SIO75: Dr. Roberta Chevrette on Feminism and Gender Studies

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and Welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode seventy-five, and I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, kind of the circumstances of the interview in the interview itself, so let's just get right over to it.

0:01:03 Thomas: I'm joined right now by Dr. Roberta Chevrette. How are you doing, Roberta?

0:01:07 Roberta: Doing great.

0:01:08 Thomas: I am really excited to talk to you. So this is actually part of my... you're my first interview for California Free Thought Day. I am interviewing a lot of the people that are going to be there. I'm going to there myself. I am very excited. But then it turns out, I think there's also a lot other stuff we can talk about, but we'll get to that. Let's start with California Free thought Day. What are you going to do in there? Tell everybody about it.

0:01:29 Roberta: Will be playing some music with my mandolin player who's local. I'm actually coming in from Nashville where I now live and have just recently moved and accepted a job at a university here. So anyway, I'm coming in and I'll be meeting up with my mandolin players who already lives there and we'll be playing a set of fun, folky, and critical kind of songs for you. I

0:01:56 Thomas: That's so awesome. I can't wait, it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to listening to your music. Do you have a link or anything for your music that people can check out ahead of time, or

0:02:06 Roberta: Do. There are some links on the Free Thought Day page, and also You can search me online and a lot of my old music comes up and some new stuff here and there.

0:02:11 Thomas: Excellent. I Will make sure to have that in the show notes, so if people want to check you out ahead of time, definitely do that. But it's so funny because when I was reading your bio when I got the list of people to interview, I didn't know who was coming for what. I assumed you were giving a talk or something because your credentials are totally awesome. You're someone I wanted to talk to anyway, because you have expertise in gender studies, among other things. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your credentials? And then we can, I want to ask you about some things, some recent topics, somewhat recent topics that you, I think you would lend a great voice to.

0:02:52 Roberta: Sure, absolutely. Well, anybody who's actually familiar with my music from previous Free Thought Days knows that I I play what I used to call fast, fierce, feminist folk music, and I'm a little older now, maybe a little bit calmer, but no less interested in critical ideas, and so I went to school after being a musician in Sacramento for several years. I finished my undergraduate degree and I have a PhD in communication now with a graduate certificate in gender studies. And so I teach and research in the areas of rhetoric and gender studies and critical cultural studies. So a lot of my work focuses on how we create ideas about gender, about race, and especially especially how these inform national and international relationships.

0:03:07 Thomas: Oh, Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. I, oh man, I have so much to ask, excuse. So I told you about that episode I recorded with the guy, one of the authors of this Conceptual Penis hoax thing. And you listened to it, and that's super cool. You mentioned before recording that you hadn't heard of it, and you're guessing most likely a lot of people in gender studies possibly haven't heard of it. I tried to contact any gender studies professor I could. You know, I tried, I think, three or four or five at the time, just to try to actually talk to somebody in the field about it, because an entire community of people seemingly was dismissing a whole field without ever even talking to somebody in the field, which I thought was the most unskeptical thing you could do.

0:04:41 Thomas: What are your thoughts on that? Do you think people were aware of this in gender studies or was this more of a niche kind of anti-feminist skeptic issue?

0:04:50 Roberta: I do think that it was largely a niche issue. Now, while I can't speak for the entire field, obviously, and every person in it, I can say that this would not be the first of a plethora of attacks on gender studies, usually coming from ideologically motivated, frequently conservative, frequently religious groups. And so it is surprising to hear about that this was taken up by Skeptic magazine, but it certainly is not the first of many attacks on the field that I think, as you address very very well in your podcast, is pretty ungrounded.

0:04:58 Thomas: Of course. Yeah.

0:05:37 Thomas: So this is something that you've had to face a lot or the field has had to face a little bit. There's nothing new, it sounds like.

0:05:43 Roberta: Well, no. I mean, as we know at a larger level, humanities, liberal arts, and especially gender studies, ethnic studies, you may be aware of all the controversies in Arizona, which is where I did my PhD, where ethnic studies programs have have been banned in Tucson, and largely by white people who are in power. I mean, these are the people who Are motivated to get rid of programs that they say foster a political ideology that's anti-state.

0:06:05 Thomas: What?

0:06:19 Thomas: Wow. No, I did not know about this. Hold on. You're saying it's

0:06:21 Roberta: Yeah, yeah, House Bill 2120, I think it was. It was at the high school level and the bill itself was rejected and now it's been reformulated or was reformulated this year and was back on the ballots again. It's an ongoing issue where largely Latino kind of studies, Mexican-American studies programs and teachers are being put under scrutiny by people

0:06:27 Thomas: Banned? So it actually went through? This is banned in universities? Or how does this work?

0:06:45 Thomas: Okay.

0:07:01 Thomas: Republicans?

0:07:01 Roberta: Who say that they're teaching a politically motivated topic.

0:07:01 Thomas: Yeah. Wow, I had no idea about that. And it's so interesting, too, because I don't know if you'll know about this, just because we're talking about these kind of little spheres of dialogue that's going on here. The skeptic, dude bro, anti-feminist wing of, I guess, my movement that I'm kind of in, though, regretting that it is what it is, they would frame this as some sort of anti-intellectual thing. They would say that gender studies, you know, there's a bunch of bunk science in it, it's not really science, stuff like that. And then a lot of it has to do with, um, framing these things as free speech issues. Those come in a lot, and it just, it strikes me as so anti-intelectual and anti-free speech to have a bill that's going to ban like a field of study. And, I mean, that is ridiculous. Yeah.

0:07:55 Roberta: Yeah. Yeah, well, and that's when I was listening to your podcast about the Conceptual Penis hoax, what I kept thinking over and over is clearly there's an ideological motivation for the people who wrote that article and who tried to debunk the field. And it's so interesting. It's interesting to me that they're claiming, oh, you know, this field is bullshit because of X, Y, Z. You know, it's not real science. But why would you be so invested in getting rid of basically a study of gender, of beliefs, of ideology? I mean, a lot of my work actually focuses on the rhetoric angle, rhetoric and persuasion.

0:08:44 Roberta: I'm teaching persuasion this semester. And how do why do we believe the things that we believe? And so clearly they have a motivation. And yet they're claiming that that's what's wrong with gender studies. So, yeah,

0:08:58 Thomas: Yeah, it is, I think a big problem that coincides with all this is this, there seems to be, in my opinion, a big problem with our politics, and I guess with this country, is the white male view is looked at as default oftentimes. Like, it's the default view, and this gender studies is this like other ideological thing, and we need to get back to the default, which just so happens to be what a bunch white male, usually classical liberals, like I want to say it is. That seems to be kind of what's going on there. You know, I do want to ask though, one thing, and sorry to put you in the position of like, defend this field, because I think it's ridiculous, but would you be able to at least take us through some of the foundations of what gender studies is doing, kind of where it, you know, like some of history of foundational works or the kinds of things it's trying to accomplish?

0:09:54 Thomas: Um, that I'm assuming aren't just trying to make ideological points about, uh, atypical genders or something. I don't know, like whatever they think it is, whatever nightmare scenario they think it is where it's just trying advocate for other kin or something, I don't know.

0:10:07 Roberta: Of course. I mean, absolutely. So the field of gender studies, it is one that has many interconnections with activism and with feminist activism. It's also one that has interconnections with a lot of research topics that I think all of us, even the people who wrote wrote this article attacking it, would agree are important. So, for example, it was research in the field of gender studies, women's studies, that gives us legislation against sexual harassment in the workplace. Is that something that we think is good? I think most people would agree, Maybe not the people who want to sexually harass other people, I guess, but there are interconnections between things that people do in the academic world and things that happen in the quote unquote real world.

Not that I think those are completely distinct, but so yeah, there's overlap in the origins of the field, probably around, I'm not sure exactly without having looked it up beforehand. I'm not sure when the first women's studies program was, but I would guess it was around second wave feminism. So initially, yes, courses in gender studies did focus on looking at women's issues that were largely overlooked in other curriculum. But they also had an impact basically on the entire academy in productive ways. So qualitative research, ethnographic research, which is a form of research that's different than statistics and counting numbers, that as well was largely born out of feminist inquiry and people saying, okay, well, there are other ways of knowing besides counting numbers or doing surveys or taking tallies of people.

0:10:45 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, right.

0:12:05 Roberta: And so there's been a lot of growth in academia at large from some of the things that are taken up by the field initially known as women's studies. More recently, I would say most programs or a lot of programs have changed their name to women's and gender studies or just to gender studies, because as theory has advanced in the field, it very quickly became clear that we weren't just talking about women and that these weren't just women's issues.

So gender is something, as we have many recent movies attesting to, there are some movies that have come out that look at masculinity, and gender is something that impacts all of us, and not just in our individual relationships and the way that we interact with other women or other men or our romantic partners, it impacts at much larger levels, how we think about the nation. The nation is built on terms like brotherhood and this kind of male bonding. And actually, a paper I just finished looks at the Broadus memes, the Obama-Biden friendship memes following Donald Trump's election, if you saw those at all. But it looks at those and how after Hillary Clinton's defeat, a democratic community turned to these like kind of jokes about masculinity and male bonding. And so what I'm trying to say, long story short, is that the field today is not purely driven or even partially driven by only women's interests.

0:13:23 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Could I ask, uh... The first part, if you remember, the first part of that episode was, I believe, if I'm I'm remembering properly, was Eli and I, and then the latter part or a later episode was with James. Gosh, now I'm blanking. No, that was two different episodes. Okay. So I did an episode with Eli Bosnick where he mainly did most of the research on debunking this, and neither of us are scientists. So, I just want to ask you, how did I and how did we do on the debunkings of some of of the claims in terms of like the journal and what it meant to be published in the journal it was published in and stuff like that. I mean, is there anything that we got wrong that you remember? Is there anything we didn't hit on that you'd like to talk about in terms of why that bogus paper didn't necessarily prove what people thought it proved?

0:14:40 Roberta: Yeah, well, I think it connects back to kind of earlier when you were saying that, or when you mentioned that, I had said it wasn't something that a lot of people in the field were paying attention to. And I think the reason for this is that academia, most people, as you guys address in the podcast, most people including the authors of this so-called debunking article, know that pay-to-play predatory journals are not real. And there's a whole hierarchy of journals. What can you do to get tenure? And of course, this also depends on your institution, whether it's private or public.

0:15:27 Roberta: But most anybody involved in academia, Unless they're a grad student who happened to get one of these emails and didn't know any better and they thought, oh, somebody wants to publish my research. Most people very clearly know the difference between What's legitimate research and what isn't. And then, of course, intensity the of that peer review process and of the scholarship that is produced by it does vary based on what level the journal is at, like we have things all the way down to undergraduate research journals to give people training in publishing in the field. And sometimes the scholarship produced in those could be pretty good or interesting, I suppose, but it's going to be at a different level than the scholarship you find in a top like high impact journal.

0:15:39 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know about this, but there's this Twitter account where a lot of these people are getting this information, which just takes like the abstract of different, I guess, studies or papers and then tries to essentially poke fun at it and often presents them as though they're manifestly absurd. And so many of the examples that James, one of the authors of the penis hoax used, pretty much all of them turned out to be sourced from that Twitter account. And a lot of them turn out, most of them had no impact score or whatever impact factor, that kind of thing. But a lot of them were like these personal essays. And what what is that? Like, is that because this is presented as, you know, this is a study or that oftentimes the the critics will say, oh, look at this study, which says that, you you know, this person is talking about their experience as a, I don't know, identifying as a different gender, whatever it is.

0:17:17 Thomas: They're like these essays. How do those function within the academic field of gender studies? What is that? Is that something that people can do as part of getting a degree? I guess I don't even know the basics of what those are.

0:17:30 Roberta: Well, there is an area of research that is called autoethnography, in which people use their own stories To inquire into deeper kinds of cultural meanings. Related is the field of performance studies within communication, where people frequently but not always engage in kind of narrative and self-inquiry work in order to get at larger themes. I think as with any scholarship, there is a range of outcomes here. So I have definitely heard people question as to whether this is a legitimate method. You know, can you just write about yourself? I don't think that the field of gender studies, like writ large, I don't think is suffering from this problem. Like if you went to most of the top journals in gender studies, you're probably not going to find a lot of autoethnographies.

However, are some that are quite powerful and quite important, quite influential, I think. And especially I have who work in that kind of area, it's also a means by which their students can better understand and interrogate the kinds of theories and things that we're teaching in class. So if I stand there in a class and, you know, I tell you all these things about the world, some of them you may hear, someof them you might not, or you know I'm trying to get you to think critically about things that are going on in the world. What better way to do that than to look at your own experiences? So

0:17:40 Thomas: Right yeah yeah okay

0:19:18 Roberta: I think it's an effective means of teaching or can be as well.

0:19:19 Thomas: But it's not as though the the the field is like founded on that or

0:19:23 Roberta: Oh, but the field does recognize the validity of experience in terms that, especially in so far as that has been left out of so many prevailing forms of inquiry.

0:19:28 Thomas: Right right Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of this too, a don't the sort of the anger and the disdain for gender studies, I think also applies sometimes to just sociology in general and like treating it as like a lesser science, you know, whereas physics or something is like the true science or math or something. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is that the pattern you see sometimes?

0:20:05 Roberta: Yeah, I think that's very much a pattern. In fact, it's a pattern that's very evidenced in the different levels of pay that people in those fields receive. I think that's a larger societal issue in terms of what we deem as important, but fields like gender studies and my field of communication, at least the area that I work in, in rhetoric and critical cultural studies, among the questions that we ask in those sorts of fields is how is it that we, like, what counts as knowledge? And where does that come from? Where does what counts as knowledge come from.

And one of the related areas that I've done some work in is actually with indigenous feminisms. And of Native American people's knowledges histories, that's not part of our canon of knowledge. Is it any less real? No, they just haven't been the ones in power to perpetuate that. So it's to the benefit of people working in the fields that are deemed serious. It's actually to their benefit to keep fields like sociology and liberal arts marginalized, just like it's to the benefits of people in the settler colonial United States to keep Native American communities pushed to the side.

0:20:43 Thomas: What

0:21:33 Roberta: You know, people in power tend to stay in power and science versus the humanities is one of those things, I would say. Yeah.

0:21:43 Thomas: Kinds of knowledge are you talking about? Cause I, I, maybe I don't know what you're talking about, but I, I would think in terms of science, like there shouldn't be too much of a, there might be bias of course and everything, but when it comes to the speed of gravity, you know, all these basic science questions, I mean, you do tests, they're going to be the same everywhere on the planet. You'd think we'd be able to get a sort of a unified scientific knowledge, regardless of culture for the most part, what kind of, but, but that's, is that not what you'RE talking about? Are you talking about more like a sociological, uh, or a philosophical kind of knowledge or what, what kinds of knowledge do you need?

0:22:19 Roberta: Yeah, I'm talking about philosophical. Or, I guess, the question really that I'm trying to get at here is what kinds of knowledge are privileged? So yes, we know about gravity. We know about planets. We know about the physical sciences, which are fascinating and very interesting and very important to us. And then we have how to write, how to speak, How do communicate with people? How do we interact with one another? How to we build relationships? Uh, care even, sorry, is one of those fields that you have the parts of it that are deemed uh scientific, and then you have other aspects of health care that get pushed into the margins, which is like, um, relating to people, which is part of health and well-being. So I'm not sure if it makes, does that make any more sense what I'm saying here? Okay.

0:22:47 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's, I think it's interesting because philosophy is the very field that would ask the question of what is knowledge. I mean epistemology, I guess would be like, what counts as knowledge. And oftentimes philosophy is looked at as, a as softer kind of stuff. Like, there's plenty of bullshit, you know, going on in philosophy and bad papers and, you know, or meaningless or whatever. You know, here's another thing I might ask you, and I wonder if this will even be a question that makes sense to you or if it's something that's been put on kind of by the outside. There's a lot of talk in these circles, too, of postmodernism being this problem that's like invaded and taken over, you know, a lot of academia. What, what's the relationship, if any, between postmodernism and gender studies? Is it, and there's, there's even, gosh, this guy, Jordan Peterson, I don't know if you know him. I hope you don't actually, uh, just because he's not worthy of the reputation he has.

0:23:28 Roberta: Yeah. In

0:24:16 Thomas: Uh, he, he refers to Postmodernism and cultural Marxism as these huge problems with, I guess, liberal thoughts on gender and gender studies and sociology and all that kind of stuff. Is that in any way sensible? Like, is there anything going on there? Is it anything you're conscious of? Or is it something people are labeling from the outside?

0:24:36 Roberta: Many ways, that's a label that is being put on in order to avoid taking the questions raised by gender studies seriously. Because when we take take the questions raised by gender studies seriously, we then have to think about, huh, well, do we care about this? What are we going to do about it? So the, the challenge, the labeling of something as postmodern or the dismissal of something is postmodern that, um, you know, we've just gone too far into this kind of relativism. Anything goes, you Know, I can write my penis, my penis and get that published, or I know that's what, not what those guys did, But that's essentially what they're, I think, trying to get at here is that the field is overrun by this kind of identity, like crazed in which nothing is real.

There is no science. There's no universals. Nothing is true. I don't think that that is characteristic of the field writ large. Rather, just as with most areas of study, you have people doing research in gender studies that the spectrum of... I mean, you have people researching violence and sexual violence and doing statistical kind of survey research that people would deem as, I guess, legit by scientific standards. And then you have people who are writing more from a philosophical area. And so you have a whole span of things. And so when I think of postmodern anyway, I think of a particular, as you mentioned, epistemological orientation to how does one do the research that they're doing. And so I think only some people working in gender studies would be able to be counted as postmodernists. And

0:24:58 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, right, right.

0:26:41 Roberta: What's funny about postmodernism is that a lot of the the authors affiliated with postmodernism also wouldn't identify as postmodernists, because one of the marks of postmodern work is that it rejects labels.

0:26:55 Thomas: Yeah actually, I spoke to a philosopher philosopher on the show about that as well. And he, he had, it's funny too, being a philosopher, I would have thought naively, I've taken some philosophy, but you know, I'm not, I don't have a degree in anything. I would've thought, well, he's going to know about postmodernism. It's going to be some branch of philosophical thought that he will have, studied you at some point. And he's like, yeah, it never comes up for me. It doesn't really, I mean, it kind of makes sense for convenience of studying it or whatever, but it's not, nobody, nobody goes into it thinking I'm going to be a postmodernist this or something that I know of. Does that ring true with, with kind of your experience in your field?

0:27:33 Roberta: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true.

0:27:39 Thomas: The other part of it was, are you a cultural Marxist and do you even know what that means? Cause I don't really, but what people

0:27:46 Roberta: Absolutely. No, I'm just kidding, actually. But no, I am not a cultural Marxist. I know what Marxism is. And so I can deduce, uh, I suppose what cultural Marxism might refer to, but no.

0:28:02 Thomas: Mean when they say that. Yeah. I think it's a way of trying to say it's really bad if you try to make genders equal. I don't know. It's something like that. I actually don't totally know what is meant by it, but it's brought up as an insult all the time. Hey, listeners, I've got to interrupt real quick to let you know that this episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking more fun so you can focus on the whole experience and not just the final plate. Each week, HelloFresh creates new delicious recipes with step-by-step instructions designed to take around 30 minutes for everyone from novices to seasoned home cooks short on time. And I can vouch for that, short on-time.

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0:29:55 Thomas: You'll enjoy it. Definitely take advantage of that. Alright, let's get back to the interview. This will kind of branch into feminism a little more. A lot of the straw man against feminism involve like, oh, well, feminists think that the genders are exactly the same and it's meaningless. Is that a fair characterization of people in the field? What is the view, I guess, the prevailing view, if there is one, on gender and gender differences? Because that seems to be a heated topic lately, especially with the Google memo and all that.

0:30:28 Roberta: Yeah. Um, let's see the prevailing view on gender and gender differences. I think that there is a wide range of views, but that what most people in gender studies take for granted is that gender is socially constructed. So How we assign meaning to gender is based on the cultural system, the symbolic system that we live in. This is why we have different gender expectations in different countries, in different cultures, in different religions, is because these things aren't a given at birth. They're culturally influenced influenced and trained into us. My own personal view, I do teach a gender and communication course and we do address some biological theories because they're interesting. And they're interesting to look at, I think. So we specifically address evolutionary theories as it relates to communication and what men's and women's different roles would have been in hunter-gatherer society society and how this would have impacted communication.

0:30:46 Thomas: Right.

0:31:41 Roberta: But basically take a look at this and what I hope my undergraduates are able to see when we talk about this is that you can't study the biology of male or female or of gender without already being embedded in culture and in a symbol system. So when we try to start assigning meanings to something as natural or scientifically typically given, we're always doing that within the systems that we live in. This is why at one point, the science of childbirth, which was largely developed through men who didn't want to like deal with women's bloody vaginas, the Western science of childhood is not the most healthy way to give birth, like even the position of lying down on a table is Not, it's not the best for the the body. And so that's why we've seen, of course, some changes in child birthing practices and more options. But I think that what the reason I give you that example is because that's part of a cultural system where we Take science and take gender norms and put them into science and and we come up with things that aren't always true.

0:32:30 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's a great example. It's probably assumptions that people aren't aware of oftentimes. And I think that's good example of where science, as you're saying there, like science and medicine, people think of it as, well, that has got to be as objective as it gets really, like whatever is good for the body, you do it, whatever. And I know there are many others of where, no, actually, there were some inherent inherent gender assumptions in this and it affected the science and it actually brought about a bad outcome and like there are probably still a lot of these things embedded in the way we do health and medicine and other things and I think that I think it's fair to say if I have it right I think it is postmodern to say, well, let's question the the assumption that there, this is just science and there's no bias to it. Let's look at it from a different standpoint and see if this is really true. Is that right?

0:33:57 Roberta: Yeah, I agree. That would be a question that ties to postmodernism. So, yeah.

0:34:03 Thomas: And so I Think it's good. Like it's good to try to take on a different view there. Are there any other examples that come to mind that people might be interested to know or where a gender bias has kind of infiltrated what we think of as just objective science?

0:34:17 Roberta: Yeah, well, I mean, another example, this is also going back quite a ways. But I think it's a pretty clear example is when women used to have like operations on their brains or things pounded into their heads, because of hysteria, you know, to basically bleed out the crazy. And interesting side note about hysteria from a language perspective is that it's the same root, I believe, that ties hysteria and uterus together.

0:34:51 Thomas: Oh yeah, a because hysterectomy, right?

0:34:52 Roberta: Yeah, yeah. And so It's really the ideas, a lot of ideas we have about rationality itself is impacted by gender, you know, reason versus the body, women's bodies as inherently less controllable and therefore more dangerous, um, a lot of Western thought about reason itself, um, has a gendered bias built into it.

0:34:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. Changing gears a little bit, If someone someone asks you, why do we need feminism? What do you say? Do you come across that question a lot? It's something that comes up a lot these days in the skeptic community, but what's your answer to that?

0:35:22 Roberta: I My first answer would be, we need feminism in a world where we don't have equality. We don't have workplace equality, we have one in four women who will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes. But beyond that, I think we need feminism to tell us to help, I guess, all people if we want to take it to that kind of a place. Me, I'm a bleeding heart, kind of. I want people to be alive and happy and, you know, hopefully not dying from unnecessary unnecessary wars or causes that could have been avoided. So I'm kind of one of those people who wants to see everybody surviving and living good lives. And I do think that we need feminism because it isn't about women. Feminism is about finding ways to create a just society that's welcoming to all people.

0:36:16 Thomas: Right.

0:36:49 Thomas: Where do you think is a big place that we currently aren't doing that? Like what's, what's a big area of inequality that, that, that you think should be a high priority for us?

0:36:59 Roberta: I mean, when I was playing music before I went back to grad school, my biggest kind of concern and critique at that time was we had just gone into war in Iraq. And that was a place where we were directly using the idea of women's rights and look at how women are oppressed in this country, and we were using it to justify a U.S. invasion and an imperial invasion, really. And so we were using this rhetoric of women's issues, of helping people, to actually a lot of harm. And so I guess, put more simply, maybe my answer to the previous question would be that personally, I think we need feminism to address, um, harms of all sorts. And if we don't think critically about, um.

0:37:12 Thomas: Right?

0:38:00 Roberta: How our ideas about gender and all of our taken for granted assumptions, how those are impacting people's ability to live, um? Quite literally, You know, people, a lot of people died, obviously, in the war. And I think a lot of that, as we know now, in retrospect, we have very few people on either side of the aisle saying they would do the same thing all over again.

0:38:30 Thomas: Yeah. I'm interested to hear the, I guess I never tied together the motivation for the Iraq war with, with that, because I mean, WMDs, I think was a big part of it, but sure.

0:38:41 Roberta: Yeah, right, right. So let me clarify. So Laura Bush gave an address at the time that we invaded Iraq in 2003. And you're absolutely right that the political reasons did not have anything to do with gender. And so it's very interesting that she gave an address in 2003 that talked about women's brutal oppression at the hands of the terrorists. And so this was used to gain cultural support for the war, for the war that was about, um, things quite different than that. This idea of women's oppression was used to gain, uh, support from a broader public. And so at that time, all of a sudden we had on all of the magazine covers on all of the news outlets, um people talking about the veil and you could do a content analysis, and you would find that in correlation with the U.S. invasion of Iraq is when this suddenly became a pseudo concern for the U S public.

0:39:17 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Yeah.

0:39:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. A lot of interesting issues going on there. One thing it reminds me of is the fact that oftentimes people do use the Middle East or or the Muslim world, in quotes, is a way to deflect from feminist causes here. That's something that happens a lot, where it's, why are you guys bellyaching? You know, look at what's happening over there. That is real misogyny. That are real patriarchy. What are your thoughts on that?

0:40:12 Roberta: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, uh, absolutely. I thinkthat's a great point. I did some of my dissertation research with a feminist group, Femin in, well, they originated in Ukraine and now they're headquartered in Paris, but they have transnational, you know, branches in different countries. And they are primarily young activists who protest topless using the strategy that they call sexstremism. And in my research and in my my involvements with them, I was somewhat critical of, I had some questions about their strategies and particularly their views of the Middle East and their use of women's oppression in the Middle East, like in their protests.

0:41:18 Roberta: But anyway, when I came back from that research, people would say to me, they would say, well, at least you don't, you know, at last you don live in a part of the world where you're buried up to your neck in sand and having rocks thrown at you. And I just think, really? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of terrible stuff going on in the world. I agree. But I think that we jump to these kinds of extremes as a way of, as you said, deflecting.

0:41:49 Thomas: Yeah, it's like, my answer usually is just that, you know, we can do more than one thing. First First off, what am I doing about the conditions in Saudi Arabia? Like, what can I do? I don't live there. I have no, you know, like, I mean, I would, if there's a good organization, I could maybe donate some money or something, but I don'T, there's nothing I can do. I can try to vote for politicians who won't enable the relationship between, you Saudi Arabia. I can, you know, sure, I'm all ears for that, but like, also, we live where we live, you You know, and if we're talking about U.S. politics and U.K. feminism, like that's where you and I are.

And that's what you know, like there's no reason that that that would apply whenever no matter how bad things were. Like if we were Saudi Arabia plus one, you know. In terms of like the equality, you now like if we are just above Saudi Arabia, you could still make that argument of like, well, things are worse over there. That doesn't you know it doesn't really say anything other than things are worst over there and. It doesn't mean you can just deflect away from real concerns that you have in the U S that's, that's how I usually answer it.

0:42:26 Roberta: Yeah. But, yeah.

0:42:57 Roberta: No, I agree, But I think that the example I gave about the kinds of things that were said to me that from my view are particularly outlandish, they're rooted in this assumption that, like, the U.S. or Western countries, first world countries, are the only modern countries that exist. Exist. And actually, there are women who are just as modern as you and I. I mean, we all live in the same era.

0:42:57 Thomas: Right.

0:43:31 Roberta: It's like women in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, they have their own voices. They're out there online. You've got women blogging, you've got feminist groups, you're got people fighting for change in their own societies, and oftentimes if we are pretty far removed from those countries and haven't done any traveling, that's where you hear the kind of, I would say, ignorant comments like the one that was made to me, as if women everywhere else in the world are just having rocks thrown at them. It's, it's not true.

0:44:09 Thomas: Well, okay. But, but is, there are places where the patriarchy is much more intense and overt. Wouldn't you say? I mean, I mean, I there are real concerns when a woman's testimony doesn't count, you know, for, in under the law, it doesn't account. It takes what is it, like, seven women for every one male boy? I mean, there, there's a lot of outright disgusting patriarchy that's encoded into these laws in a lot of these places. So.

0:44:37 Thomas: I guess I'm not sure you're not trying to say like that they're equal in terms of, maybe I just wasn't understanding what you were saying. Do you think inappropriate to say that things are worse elsewhere, or maybe I didn't take your point correctly?

0:44:10 Roberta: Yeah. Yeah, I think that, well, a couple of points about that. One is that in most places, patriarchy does not apply in the same ways to all people. So if we take the extremes in any country or culture, we're going to find injustices. But am I arguing for a kind of cultural relativism that says, whatever people want to do, that's all good? No, absolutely not.

0:45:24 Roberta: But what I do believe, and what I think a lot of research and theory backs up, is that the most effective ways of fighting against inequality and patriarchy come from the inside. And so if people who are genuinely concerned about women's or transgender or anybody's rights in any part of the world, if they want to find ways to effectively ally with communities of people working on the inside. I think that makes sense. But I am saying is that I don't think there's anywhere that women are just sitting there saying, oh, sure, yeah, I'm seven tenths or, you know, one seventh of a person. Yeah, I support that. You know, women are thinking, living, acting beings everywhere else. And so it's when we take when we have this view of, oh well, we know more And so we're going to help them. And then that gets tied up with things like politics and war and economy. And it doesn't work.

0:45:24 Thomas: Okay, right, right. Sure, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I don't know if there are any examples anywhere in history of like, well, let's just go mandate an entire system on somebody and enforce it. It just doesn't often work out. People don't, humans don't do that very well. They don't respond To just being like taken over and like told what to do and like, and okay, so that makes more sense.

Um, thing that is a difficult issue, though, and I think there's, I think it's like a sort of a knife's edge of like, it's really easy to fall one way or the other in terms of either being misogynistic versus maybe, maybe being a little too cultural relativistic, is when you talk about things like the veil, as you alluded to, like things like burkas, you know, because what even, type, I just did an episode with somebody on FGM, something where what you'll have happen is, you know, I, me sitting here in the U.S. and the time and place that I am, FGMs seems horrible to me, that seems like an obviously, uh, obviously the wrong thing to do, and then what will happen is you'll get people arguing in favor of it who are women who have have had it done to them.

0:46:35 Roberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:47:43 Thomas: And so there's a weird balance and a difficult balance between saying like, well, now surely that's wrong. But at the same time, it does sometimes put you in a position of like, no, I know better than you and you've had, you know what I mean? It's a, it's a weird thing to balance. I think there's a lot of concerns there on either side. Like you could go too far either direction pretty easily. It seems to me.

0:48:04 Roberta: Yeah, I think those are challenging questions. I actually met an African feminist and worked with her at a conference several years ago. And some of her work also looks at issues of FGM and Western imperialism. And it's, I don't think there's an easy answer to those kinds of questions. And I think very few people are saying, oh, well, this is, you know, this is fine exactly how it is.

0:48:42 Thomas: Right. Right? Yeah, no. That's, that's difficult. And, and another, another question I think comes up a lot because in atheism circles, because I do think a big concern that you've already touched on, I think relates a lot to it, is using sort of, using Muslims and ex-Muslims in a way to gain political favor either way, like, using there's a lot of that, like, sort of a tokenism of, if, if ex-Muslims are are saying the right things against Islam, then they're vaulted in this community, like, to to a position of prominence, but if if they're not saying quite the right things, then they're really attacked.

And it's all, it's a weird thing. But along with that, I'd be curious for your perspective on the question of like, can a veil be a feminist thing? Because there are some people who say No, you know, like, this religion, this misogynistic religion, forces women to cover up most of the time, and despite the fact that some women say they do it voluntarily, they will say that, but, you know, this is something that culturally and religiously is inflicted on women, and it's a very demeaning thing to say you have to cover yourself and only one specific group of people has to do this. Whereas other people say, no, I want to wear the hijab as kind of like reclaiming it.

It's like a feminist kind of icon in a way. What are your thoughts on that? That. I mean, it really, I get the argument that it's, that it could be a, you know, a choice, you know? That women definitely can make the choice to do. But at the same

0:50:15 Thomas: Time, I also think there's a powerful patriarchal misogynistic drive that, that, that invented it in the first place.

0:50:23 Roberta: Yeah. I mean, gosh, you're really jumping me right into some of the most controversial kinds of.

0:50:27 Thomas: Yeah. Answer all these incredibly difficult problems that people argue about forever.

0:50:34 Roberta: Yeah. So I think the veil has been and can be utilized in feminist ways. And there are people who have written about this, Muslim feminists who have written about this, for example, how women hid weapons under their veils in the Algerian revolution to gain independence from France. And so there are people who have written about the veil as enabling women to move more freely through society. So if we want to look at it from from a kind of universalizing standpoint and say, you know, this is being enforced on women. Um, I mean, are we trying to make a kind of, you know, philosophical argument or are we looking at the reality and the practice? And when, and you mentioned the reclaiming and people wearing hijab. And I think that a lot of what has happened in terms of global kinds of relationships and cultural relationships, I mentioned that the feminist group I studied with, they're now headquartered in France.

0:50:58 Thomas: Hmm.

0:51:54 Roberta: And this was one of the aspects of their protests that I was critical of. They believe that the three kinds of pillars of patriarchy are religion, dictatorship, and the sex industry. And their protests, some of their, yeah, like Sex tourism, they started in Ukraine, so, uh, prostitution.

0:52:11 Thomas: Hmm? Sex interest? What does that mean? Like like sex workers or, or what do you mean by the sex? Like sex, like, oh, okay. Like trafficking or like human trafficking kind of stuff. Okay.

0:52:27 Roberta: A lot of people. Like, sex tourism is very big in Ukraine, so people go there to sleep with prostitutes, mail order brides, and and things Like that. And so that was a concern for the women, uh, who started this organization in Ukraine, obviously. But going back to France, they have done quite a few protests. The first one that came to my attention was one that they called, "Topless Jihad." And had a bunch of women who look, for the most part, they looked very white, normative, beautiful, like, you know, stereotypical Barbie doll types almost, who marched through the Muslim quarters of France topless with signs saying things like "Muslim women, let's get naked." And so in that protest itself, which caught my attention and was one of the reasons I wanted to out more about this group, you have the issue of Western women speaking for other women.

0:52:36 Thomas: Okay, yeah.

0:53:35 Roberta: And is that effective? Is it offensive? Most Muslim feminists who I've spoken with about this, they find it quite offensive. And so what has frequently happened is that because of Western interventions in the Middle East, which have been going on for a very long time. The rise in fundamentalism, women are frequently pitted against their country, their nation, their culture, or their gender. So we're asking people to make choices to side with one or the other, but there was an impossible kind of situation constructed in which for a woman to be feminist is now associated with being Western, and being Western is associated with badness and imperialism, right? And so you've got this weird dynamic where keeping women traditional or something like that, um, is a way of resisting the West.

0:54:47 Thomas: Yeah, that is, that is a really complex issue, I think. And you know what, you pointed out, and I want to apologize for springing these, I just want to tell everybody, like I did not tell you any of these questions I was going to ask ahead of time, just so everybody knows. I I just decided to spring on some of the most difficult ethical questions about feminism that I could think of, and thank you for being a good sport and providing really good answers to it, but I think it is appropriate to point out I did not warn you ahead of time, so just so everybody knows.

0:55:17 Roberta: Thank you.

0:55:18 Thomas: Well, just to give you more credit for being able to answer so well off the cuff, it's really impressive.

0:55:18 Roberta: Yeah. I think there are important questions, and I hope that I can come close to even beginning to do justice to, um, all of the people who could certainly speak on this issue, uh, many of whom have much more direct firsthand experience than me. Than me, a white woman, uh, again speaking for Muslim women. You You know, I'm

0:55:41 Thomas: Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, California Free Thought Day is right here in Sacramento, where I am. It is October 16th. You're going to be there. You're gonna be playing music. I can't wait to see you. I can't wait to be at the event. And thanks for coming on in addition to plugging Free Thought Day, which again, if anyone's around, I really hope you'll come and see us. But also, thank you for the really interesting conversation. I'm so glad that I was able to finally speak to somebody with actual knowledge of gender studies. Imagine that.

0:56:18 Roberta: Yeah, thank you, thank you for having me, and I can't wait to be at Free Thought Day and see some old, and hopefully some new, faces there.

0:56:27 Thomas: Excellent.

0:56:53 Thomas: Alright, everyone, make sure to, if you're in the area, anywhere near the area come to Free Thought Day, uh, Sunday, October 15th, as I mentioned, Roberta, among others, and I'm going to be there, uh and I am going to bring you a few more interviews of people who will be at the event, so it's really cool, I can't wait for it. We'll Check out the link in the show notes. There's a lot going on there. There are several days, actually, of different events, and there's so much to see and do, so please check it out. With that said, thank you so much for listening, and I will see you for another episode on Thursday.