What are we ready to risk? Academia, advocacy, and activism

I graduated from Tufts University this weekend, with a Ph.D. in Child Study and Human Development. I was honored to be the student speaker for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Doctoral Hooding Ceremony. Here is what I said.

As the non-indictment verdict arrived, I was working on my dissertation. Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, will have no trial. The people of Ferguson protest: Black Lives Matter. They call for an end to business as usual, but my business as usual was just getting good. I wanted to write my dissertation and I really, really wanted this degree.

And I was tired. Business as usual is exhausting and there’s no energy left for protests and movement building and solidarity.

Abigail Ortiz taught me that solidarity means sharing risk. I ask myself what risks I am willing to share as a white person in solidarity with people of color: Am I willing to risk arrest? Injury? Reputation? Career?

The system is built to maintain itself.

In the first month of 2015, four black trans women were murdered. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. The intersectionality of oppression is life and death.

Alicia Garza writes:

“Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.

Morgan Collado writes:

Support for trans women dwindles when we are still alive… It points to who is valuable and who is disposable. If you’re not a trans woman… think long and hard about the ways that you’re supporting trans women in your community. Do you see trans women in public community spaces? How are your actions pushing them out? 

I learned to do academic work that could inform advocacy. I wrote a guide for youth development programs about queer-inclusivity, racial justice, and trauma-informed practice. What is life anyway but one giant youth development program? These principles can guide both the work we do and how we run our workplaces.

But these systems are built to maintain themselves.

As PhDs, we are pronounced producers of knowledge. We can use our position within the system – and the peer-reviewed knowledge that we produce – to advocate for change. That’s our professional work; activism is the personal work. But activism, solidarity, is risky. I want a job, tenure, grants, clout. I want those things for myself and for my advocacy – I am building power and building knowledge with hope that I can leverage my power and my knowledge to make a difference.

Can I continue working on that, while also working to break down the systems that grant me this power?

These systems are built to maintain themselves. And I am a part of that.

But these systems are not okay. We need an end to business as usual, and we all need to commit to that end, as knowledge-producers and as human beings, each situated at various sites of power, within White Capitalist Heteropatriarchy.

So now that our degrees are not on the line anymore, what are we ready to risk?

Queer Identity: More Questions than Answers

I didn’t realize it would be so hard to be queer after I got married. Seems like it should have been obvious to me, right? Marry a heterosexual cis-man, turn in queer club card, do not pass go, still collect hundreds of dollars of apparently-straight privilege. Is that how it has to be?

I had a boyfriend in college who once told a friend I was bisexual. His friend asked, “Is she actively bisexual?” Actively? What does that mean? At this very moment? My boyfriend told me this story in order to laugh at that friend’s ignorance. Silly friend, he must think that being bisexual requires actively pursuing multiple partners at the same time. Clearly, us enlightened folks knew I could be bisexual and just have a boyfriend and no other partners. No problem with that, right?

At the time, I feel a problem with that at all. My sexual orientation was about my identity, and it was about my past and my future as much as my present. I never even really identified as bisexual. Mostly, I identified as queer, which allowed me to position myself as “not heterosexual” while not succumbing to a word with the prefix “bi,” referring to a binary conception of gender in which I do not believe.

Actually, it wasn’t until deep into my current relationship that I started identifying as bisexual sometimes. “Bisexual” seems like a more specific identity than “queer,” staking a claim in the queer community that can more easily be reconciled with my current relationship status. But the truth is, it’s not like I walk around with a “bisexual” sticker on my forehead, and not a lot of people ask me how I identify. So it only seems to come up when I bring it up.

I’ve been partnered with a cismale for four years, and last year we publicly committed to each other through that complicated ritual commonly known as a wedding. Our relationship is monogamous, so I am not “actively” bisexual, since I am not pursuing sexual liaisons with anyone besides my partner. Given my current situation, what would it mean for me to be somehow “meaningfully” queer/bisexual? In my last relationship, my sexual orientation signified the diversity of my past and my future liasons. But I have no plans to pursue other relationships now or in the future. Without opening up our relationship or engaging in some form of non-monogamy, what would it mean for me to have a meaningful queer identity in the present?

The Klein scale has seven categories for assessing sexual orientation: attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle preference, and self-identification. It is only in the “sexual behavior” category that change has occurred for me. So my identity inside really hasn’t change much, but the most visible marker that communicates my identity to other people has certainly changed. What I’m trying to figure out is, what effect does this have on my life, and on my membership in queer community?

I want to take a minute to discuss privilege, which, not so coincidentally, I also wrote about privilege last year on pride weekend. As David Levy wrote recently, the Pride Parade is a celebration as well as a political action. Since I benefit from all kinds of heterosexual privilege in my life, in what ways is this protest/celebration my parade, and in what ways is it not? I try to keep myself from taking up too much space, and I try to stay sensitive to the times when I should step back and take a position as an ally rather than claiming queer celebration as my own. But maybe I’m wrong, because it feels wrong when I do that, because queer is my own.

I’ve met a few people recently at queer events whom I really liked, and I might have vaguely led them to believe I’m queer, simply through context and association, and maybe also discussion of our life histories. It isn’t actually leading them on, since I am queer. But then later, they find out about my current situation. Do they still believe me that I’m queer? Do they feel I lied to them or led them on? Did I somehow owe it to them to be super-clear and upfront about my orientation and relationship status, even though they didn’t ask? Am I doing something wrong? Or not? Or should I just drop all this self-doubt and get over it?

Bisexual invisibility is a very tricky issue, because it is a privilege and a pain at the same time. I benefit from an extraordinary amount of material and cultural hetero-privilege. At the same time, I feel invisible within my queer community because I don’t know if people think I’m legit, or if I can ever be legit, or if I am taking up too much space, or if I’m needlessly shooting myself down with internalized biphobia or some other crap. It’s all very confusing and complicated. I have a feeling that there really aren’t clear answers, but I have a bunch of questions, and I would love to know what you think.

My name is Mimi, and you can use “she” and “her” to refer to me

The first time I was asked to share my name and pronoun, I felt pretty upset. Why make gender so primary, right here at the beginning of this event, as we introduce ourselves to each other? I was in the woods with a bunch of Jewish activists, trying to escape the gender binary and fight the patriarchy. So I said something like this: “My name is Mimi, and you can use ‘she’ to refer to me, as long as you understand that doesn’t say anything about who I am and what I’m capable of.”

I was at a point in my life where priming gender was really hard for me. “Priming” refers to the idea that simply bringing up a social category, such as gender, results in psychologically (and maybe subconsciously) bringing up the stereotypes associated with that social category, such that the pressure associated with those stereotypes has a stronger effect. I felt that identifying myself along the gender binary meant making myself vulnerable to expectations based on gender. Just because I didn’t think twice when people refer to me as “she” didn’t mean I was totally comfortable with everything in the category of “woman.”

Five years later, having learned a lot about my own and other people’s experiences of gender, and having more access to multiple means of both escaping the gender binary and fighting the patriarchy, I came around. Friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators at Keshet taught me many valuable lessons about how to be an ally to transgender, genderqueer, and gender variant people. I came to see my own privilege in the fact that when a person is left to their own devices to guess what pronoun is best to use when referring to me, that person will always choose “she.” At least, people always have, and I my guess is that they always will. So I never have to fear being “mis-pronoun-ed” (someone using the wrong pronoun to refer to me). In addition, I don’t have to endure any uncomfortable or tense moments when I first meet someone, as they figure out what pronoun to use. In fact, I’d never actually thought about what pronoun I use until that moment in the woods with the fruity Jews.

Now, opening a space by inviting everyone to share their name and their preferred pronoun has a lot of meaning for me, on multiple levels.

• We get to make our space safer for trans and gender variant people: We directly address the fear/discomfort of being mispronounced by establishing preferences at the beginning of the event
• We get to complicate gender: Through this ritual, we demonstrate our belief that gender is not always binary and is not always obvious by looking at someone.
• We get to stand in solidarity: People always have referred to me using my preferred pronoun without me having to say anything. But by saying something anyway, I am putting myself in alliance with people who need to specify their preferred pronoun in order for other people to know what to say.

For these reasons, I have come to value sharing names and pronouns as an important ritual for setting the space of a community event or retreat. In my next post, I share some questions that have come up in introducing this ritual to my current community.

Jackson Katz responded to my email (and here's what I wrote back)

Hi Dr. Katz,

I deeply appreciate your taking the time to respond to my email. I am going to take another opportunity to express my concerns with more detail and clarity, in response to the issues you raised in our personal correspondence.

In terms of not serving queer folk:

I agree that MVP does great work to address harassment that targets sexual minority and gender variant individuals. As I want to emphasize, I think MVP is in a very powerful position to impact violence perpetrated by and through heteronormative masculinity. In contrast, one of my major concerns, as I will explain further in a moment, is about the experiences of transgender and gender variant folks who might actually be in the room during an MVP workshop. Another major concern is that people who have or will have same-sex relationships will not realize in MVP that sexual and relationship violence can happen between two women or between two men, as well. Such work may not be within the goals of MVP as a program, but I do think there are steps that MVP can take to address and support these needs.

In terms of silencing survivors in the room:

This point is tricky. As a sex educator myself, I struggle with the ability to provide a space in which survivors can receive strong support without identifying themselves, and, in addition, to make space in which survivors can choose to identify themselves and use the power of identification to push back against the silencing and shaming cultural norms in our society. It’s about actively structuring my teaching based on the assumption that in any given group, there will be people in the room who are survivors of various forms of violence. Addressing people who are survivors only as potential bystanders can be guilt-inducing and embarrassing. To be a male ally to women who have experienced sexual violence requires a trauma-informed curriculum and approach.

In terms of reinforcing the gender binary:

I completely agree with you that gender neutrality is counter-productive. To talk about sexual violence, we need to analyze gendered power dynamics in history, society, and in our lives. And I appreciate that the MVP policy is to allow people to self-identify, as in, if someone identifies as a man, he can go to the men-only break-out group, and if someone identifies as a woman, she can go to the woman-only breakout group. But I'm wondering, what about someone who doesn't identify as either a man or a woman? Or someone who identifies as both? Such people exist, and they matter. But I do not see them within the MVP curriculum, and that scares me. I don't know what to do about it, either. I have a lot of ideas, and I also recognize the complexity. So at this point I am working to name what I'm seeing. To render visible what is now invisible.

In terms of the need for more comprehensive sexual violence prevention:

Here is my question for you: What does MVP do to "set the stage" for an expansion of comprehensive programs? I can see all the fabulous ways in which MVP is a strong program to start the conversation, to address the most resistant leaders and to start building social norms that would facilitate further sexual violence prevention work. However, in reality, I picture schools and colleges saying "well, we do MVP, that's our sexual violence thing." Thus, in practice, MVP could very well be the sole source of sexual violence education in many communities. That's why I'm voicing my concerns. My question is, what can MVP do to be a better ally? When MVP does work with mixed-gender groups, the people in the room who aren't the hetero/masculine men (who were the original target group of MVP) are not being prioritized in the conversation. Interestingly, these are the very same people (women, queer folk, gender variant folk) who are not being prioritized in society at large. So what is MVP as an organization doing to directly link schools and campuses with programs that will address the needs of women, people who have same-sex relationships, and people who are transgender or gender variant?

The broader question I'm getting at is: What does it take to be an ally? What is the imperative on those of us with power to truly open spaces in which we can directly hand over power to those who need more of it in order to be safe, in order to speak up, and in order to exist? How can I be a better ally to others? How can I ask you to be a better ally to me?

How do we prevent men's violence against women without recreating the sexism we are trying to end?

"How do we have men and women working together on preventing men's violence against women without recreating the sexism we are trying to end?" 
--Jackson Katz, at the Mentors in Violence Prevention Bystander Intervention Conference at Northeastern University, May 31, 2012

Dear Jackson Katz,

Great question.

Here’s my short answer: Currently, you are indeed recreating the sexism you are trying to end.

Here’s my long answer: Thank you for having the wherewithal to recognize the complexity and challenge in being a person with privilege taking leadership on issues of systemic oppression and violence. Thank you for your leadership, thank you for your decades of work, and thank you for continuing to ask yourself how you can be a better ally.

What I say in this blog post may be read as a criticism, and I want you to know that I am criticizing you because we are on the same team. We have the same mission. As we work towards this mutual goal, I believe I have a perspective that you need to hear. So, let’s get coffee (or the internet equivalent, if you’re back in Cali by now).

Yesterday I was at the MVP Bystander Intervention Conference, and I’ve also participated in the MVP Institute training program as well as taught several workshops myself in the (distant) past. I have a lot of respect and affection for the work done by MVP. I personally have gained so much from your organization, including some of my favorite workshop activities addressing gender and systemic violence, and that’s why I am so invested in seeing it do good work now and in the future.

For my readers: Jackson Katz founded MVP in 1993, to recruit male student athletes as leaders in ending men’s violence against women. Yes, just men’s violence against women. Not all sexual violence, not all gender-based violence. That’s fine. No one can do everything, maybe. The MVP approach is to address men as potential active bystanders—to talk to men about why stand up as a bystander, and possible ways to intervene in sexist and violent behavior. Calling other men to understand men's violence against women as a fundamental social justice issue (see The Macho Paradox), Katz and MVP have brought their work to sports teams, fraternities, and the military.

Back to Dr. Katz: I’m grateful that you recognize the role that masculine role models can play in reshaping masculinity and addressing men’s violence. I can’t walk into hockey team locker rooms and talk to them about sexual assault. The NFL isn’t inviting me to speak with their players about rape. You are getting into those spaces and opening up conversation, and I’m impressed and grateful.

That said, Bystander Intervention training is NOT a comprehensive sexual violence prevention program. Bystander Intervention should NOT be promoted in mainstream spaces as a priority over actual skill-building that addresses actual people of all genders as people with bodies, people with intimate relationships, people with the capacity for sex and for love. Where are those people in Bystander Intervention training? I understand the importance of getting your foot in the door by addressing everyone as potential Bystanders so participants aren’t as defensive. But your approach is actively silencing those people in the room who may be more than potential bystanders—they may be victims and survivors of sexual or relational violence. Where are those people able to express their lived experiences in your workshops?

Furthermore, when you split up the participants into groups of “men/boys” and “women/girls,” to talk specifically about “men’s” violence against “women,” you are erasing the existence of trans* and genderqueer people. Erasing them. There is not room for people with non-binary gendered experiences and identities within the curriculum you use. What are you going to do about that? That is a major problem. It’s a problem that is the Achilles heel of your intervention. You cannot expand so much. You cannot be everyone’s solution.

When MVP comes to “mainstream” spaces and coed spaces—spaces that are not these hyper-masculine communities that were the original location of this Bystander Intervention—then you recreate the sexism you are trying to end by silencing the voice of survivors and by rendering invisible those living outside the gender binary.

 What are you going to do about that?

From your ally,
Mimi Arbeit

Why am I still crying over my registry?

I thought I could be everything that other people needed me to be, but I can’t. There’s no way I can.

So why am I still crying over my wedding registry?
a) Because I didn’t originally want to make a registry at all
b) Because I worked so hard to make my registry look right to others that I didn’t make it right for me
c) Because I feel it’s my responsibility, even though it’s really our responsibility
d) Because I had assumed I could make the right decisions in the right moments, and then I didn’t
e) All of the above

In my series analyzing the role of capitalism, patriarchy, and materialism in the process of wedding planning, how could I overlook this one ever-so-obvious element: the wedding registry? Well, when I was blogging in the month leading up to our wedding, I actually wasn’t thinking about the registry at all. Sure, I was enjoying our beautiful gifts—some of which I certainly remembered choosing myself—but I wasn’t facing head-on my experience with the registry process. No, the registry process began far earlier, more than a year before the wedding itself.
And now that we’re approaching our first anniversary, I’m learning that the registry is also an element of wedding planning that lasts long after the event itself. (At some point I’ll also share my thoughts on the wedding photos…)

What is the registry really about? No, scratch that, what is a wedding present really about? Is it about the couple and their wants and needs? Is it about the friends and family and what they want to get for the couple? Is it about the wedding-industrial-complex playing off the insecurity of couple and guests alike, creating and exaggerating need and want on all sides?
And what about the narrative of “you may not think you need it now but you will love having it later”? In all fairness, I don’t know that this narrative is definitely false, but it seems suspect. It seems all about creating need where there is none. If I have something that I’m not using, I will return it, give it away, or create a need for it so that I can start using it. But that doesn’t mean I actually needed it—or wanted it—in the first place.

I hesitate to rant and rave too much because I am so grateful for the loving, generous support of the many people who helped me put together my registry. After all, they were truly trying to help. And I am so grateful for the loving, generous gifts I received from friends and family, both gifts from my registry and off-registry surprises. And while I am nitpicking a few specific decisions that I probably would do differently if I had another chance, I totally understand the practical nature of producing a registry during a year when you expect lots of people to want to buy things for you. However, the nature of the market is not simply practical. In my first round of registry-producing, I tried to really focus on things we needed (e.g., pots and pans, plates and bowls, cutlery) and things we wanted (e.g., games, electronics). But then people told me that it wasn’t enough. I simply didn’t have enough items on the registry, enough things for people to choose from, enough nice things. The registry wasn’t fancy enough, apparently, and people would want to buy us “nice” things whether we wanted them or not. Things we really needed, like an iron and ironing board, we still don’t have. And a lot of people went off registry—maybe that would have happened anyway, or maybe indeed they were not satisfied with the range of items on our registry. I don’t know. There seem to be many different forces at play in these dynamics, but too many of these forces feel like they are working against me/us and what we really want.

A note on gender dynamics. As I’ve written about, I am a female who married a male, and while in our partnership we commit ourselves to addressing structures of power both at home and in the world, we certainly got to experience some of the workings of the patriarchy first-hand through the process of wedding planning. When it came to the registry, he had the privilege of not having an opinion. Not wanting to decide. What made this even more complicated at the beginning is that he is the one that does all the cooking. So when I made the first pass at registering for pots and pans, it seriously made no sense. He did come to Crate and Barrel with me one day to use the zapper, and we sat down together to create our Amazon registry. But when it came to the border-line calls, the hardest elements, and the pressure from friends and family—those decisions felt like they fell on me, because he would look at me with “BORED” written all over his face, honestly not knowing even how to try to have an opinion, and let me make the decision on my own.

And you know what? I LET HIM. He was actually the one to point this out in a recent conversation: “Mimi,” he said, “Sometimes, you need to tell me that I need to have an opinion. Just shake me until I engage.” He recognized the ways in which male privilege gave him the space to back away, leaving me with the burden of decision and diplomacy. And he honored me with this invitation to call him out in such future occasions—to say no to his boredom, to tell him that I need him as a full partner. I needed to tell him to go figure out how to have an opinion, how to think with me. I wonder what was going on in my psyche when I didn’t do this last year: was I protecting him? Did I so dislike the task of registry management that I thought I might as well deal with it on my own, leaving him free of that one source of stress? Of the many things I learned from wedding planning, I think one of the lessons I learned is not to “put up with” stress that seems unfair. I had the right to ask for him to be a partner on my side; I had the right to say “no” to tasks I didn’t want and didn’t value; we have the right to try to do our life our way, even when it means we can’t be what other people think they need us to be.

I thought I could be everything that other people needed me to be, but I can’t. There’s no way I can. So now, I’m trying to be what I need me to be. And that’s hard enough as it is.

An Open Letter to Tufts Magazine

Dear Tufts Magazine,

“The New Girl Order,” an article by Kay Hymowitz in your Fall 2011 issue, is a misinformed and narrowminded article that insults both girls and boys in America today. Hymowitz puts girls in danger by making the argument that there is no more need for feminism and that somehow the position of girls in society today is the best it could ever be. Hymowitz bluntly perpetuates the war of the sexes by looking for point-by-point equality rather than stepping back and asking, given a history of patriarchy, what can we do now to achieve gender equity. Furthermore, Hymowitz’s final messages seemed pinned on hurtful and antiquated ideas about marriage.

Hymowitz cites girls’ advancement in education as evidence that feminism has succeeded and is no longer necessary. Increasing numbers of women in science and engineering must mean that we’re all set. But we are not: I could talk about the glass ceiling, the need for more women in politics and the need for more fair and holistic representations of women in the media. I could talk about how women on college campuses face an epidemic of sexual violence and the “terrible trio of shame, blame, and fear” when they try to pursue their own desires. I could also cite the very research that Hymowitz dismisses—the tradition of Carol Gilligan of listening to voices of girls as they become teenagers, as they silence their own needs in order to become that perfect girl that everyone else wants them to be. Furthermore, I could and should write about so many women who don’t make it to college because they don’t have access to the education or the money they need, or because they were not encouraged to pursue their dreams. So many “American girls” are not the girls about whom Hymowitz writes—the ones who benefit from own race, class, citizenship, and other privileges that remain invisible in this article yet delineate her entire argument.

Another major misconception in this article is that equality and equity are not the same thing. Hymowitz seems to believe that we have reached equity once we have both “College Women’s Centers” and “College Men’s Centers.” She lives in an utterly binary, separatist world. I don’t want to live in that world. I am a feminist, but I do not, as she thinks I do, “worry that if we pay more attention to boys we will take our eyes off girls.” In fact, I heartily believe that the key to improving our education system and transforming gender socialization is empowering children and youth of all genders to explore, express, and embody. Hymowitz lauds a girls’ softball coach who decided to “coach them like men.” But treating girls the way we treat boys will not help anyone. What about the boys who want to sew, cook, care for children, build close friendships, and share their feelings? Where is the room for them in our culture, in our gender system? According to Hymowitz, feminists “could say that the culture of male privilege is so powerful that it can’t hurt for boys to be pulled down a peg or two.” Actually, dismantling the culture of male privilege is essential—for women and girls, for men and boys, and for everyone who can’t live and love within such a rigidly policed, binary system of gender.

Hymowitz, for a moment, would agree with me that girls and women stand to gain a lot from more attention paid to boys and masculinity. But her reasons for wanting to attend to boys are quite the opposite of mine. She says that girls are going to begin looking for males to marry, and will struggle to find males as educated and accomplished as themselves, and will instead choose to be single mothers, which she sees as a crisis. (Of course, in her world, the option of two women marrying each other does not seem to be available.) I find this last paragraph utterly offensive. It proves that her investment in the “betterment” of boys is not because feminism has done its work but actually quite the opposite—she invests in patriarchy because it provides a foundation for normative heterosexuality. Men have to be successful and powerful in order for women to be their subordinate wives.

I’m sorry, but as I finish reading this article, I completely fail to understand why you published this in the Tufts Magazine. Once I have my Ph.D. from your institution, will you be ashamed of me unless I become the wife of a man who also has a doctorate or other advanced degree? Women’s lives do not revolve around wearing a diamond given to them by a man with the right resume. Clearly, we still have a lot of work to do in promoting positive development for all youth and freeing all youth from hegemonic gender ideologies.

All my best,
Mimi Arbeit

In Support of Effective Government

I am not protesting against the government. I am protesting in support of the government. I am in support of a government that works, one that does its job, one that takes care of the American people and demonstrates positive teamwork across the globe. I support President Obama, and I want to see this country’s administration doing its thing a little more. Let’s make change.

I support Occupy Wall Street because we are the 99 percent, and we want a better government.

In the fall of 2000, I was in 10th grade, and I learned that the government is not doing its job well, not supporting the American people in the ways in which they need support. I was a stellar student at a stellar suburban public school, told that if I worked hard I could achieve wonders. And I believed it, because I had the resources to help me and the people to encourage me. I read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to do a book report, and my world changed. I read about other public schools, underfunded public schools, with run-down buildings, overcrowded and violent hallways, and classrooms in which tired and scared teachers struggled to teach hungry and traumatized students.

I was sold. I can fix this problem, I said to myself. I have found what I will do with my life. I love schools, and I love teaching, and I can help make all American public schools as great as mine.

Well, Jonathan Kozol and countless others had already spent decades trying to do the same, and they had not yet succeeded. The more I researched the issue and taught and tutored in urban public schools, the more I discovered classism, racism, financial crisis, financial restructuring, and what I consider a totally irresponsible government.

How did our government get away with spending money on corporations and war-waging when our schools needed that money for repairs, resources, curriculum, and teacher training? When our students were hungry? When our families needed health care, jobs, housing?

As someone passionate about education, I have done a lot of work in non-profit organizations. And yes, many of them are working to address inequities in education, and in other areas. But what I truly believe is that this work of ensuring high-quality education and providing high-quality health care and jobs and housing and food is the primary responsibility of an effective democratic government.

I quickly learned that I would not fix the system alone. It is too broken, in too many parts, and in such complex ways.

So I support Occupy Wall Street. Because I support the government. I support a government that is working for the 99 percent. We can do this work. I want to see the government take on this challenge. I want to see President Obama make this happen. I want to help make this happen.

Why are we getting married? Accepting privilege while wanting it eliminated

Having reached the midway-point of this June journey of wedding-prep, I will take a break to reflect on why I’m even doing this—having a wedding—in the first place. And to address the question of why we are having a wedding, I really need to address the question of why we are getting married.

Deciding to get married: Over two years ago, my partner and I expressed our mutual desire to embark upon a lifelong partnership together. A lot of our decision to get married came from our desire to demonstrate our investment in this partnership and celebrate our joy with friends and family. That said, why the marriage license?

In college, I became ardently against the institution of marriage as it now functions in the United States. See http://beyondmarriage.org/ for some activism that has informed my beilefs. The basis of this stance is that the benefits and protections afforded to married couples should be restructured so that all people can access them. This position grew out of a radical response to the same-sex marriage movement.

I believe that the same-sex marriage movement and the beyond-marriage movement are both extremely important. I believe we must restructure the legal institution of marriage to incorporate same-sex couples, as well as couples in which one person is genderqueer or intersex. In addition, I believe that our country must engage in the long-term work of restructuring our many systems of social and economic privilege so that all people can access these cares and protections.

Legal protection: Beginning to intertwine my life with someone else’s is really exciting, and it is also really risky. Both in Jewish and American law, getting married means taking on certain responsibilities and gaining a degree of legal protection. As we share living quarters, a bank account, and possibly offspring, our marriage license gives us access to a plethora of legal back-up options should something happen to one of us individually or to our relationship.

Tax breaks: Married couples get tax breaks. As a Massachusetts resident at least I know that my married same-sex partners do have access to at least some of the privileges of legal marriage. However, since the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages, legally married Massachusetts residents do not receive the federal tax break if they are in a same-sex marriage.

Health care: While on a personal level I am excited and relieved by the prospect of being able to put my partner on my health care plan or vice-versa, I also think that health care should be available to everyone. Married, single, healthy, unhealthy, employed, unemployed, old, young, everything. Everyone should get health care. Health care is a right, not a privilege.

On the one hand, I have listed and explained some of my reasons for getting married. On the other hand, many of these same reasons inform my belief that the legal institution of marriage should be eliminated.

I look at it this way: I recognize that for myself and my partner, access to health care, tax breaks, and legal protection will improve our lives. We have the privilege of signing a marriage license and thus enjoying these benefits. However, it also seems obvious to me that if everyone’s lives would be improved by such access, and making a lifelong commitment to someone of the opposite sex does not make me better or more deserving than other people, I should not have access to these resources while others do not. The institution of marriage in our country needs some radical restructuring.

Reckoning with Personal Privilege

This weekend was Boston Queer Pride. As a cisgendered female about to marry a cisgendered male, I spent a lot of this weekend and the weeks leading up to it thinking about social and political privileges that come with making a lifetime monogamous commitment, with religious recognition of our commitment, with legal recognition of our commitment, and with being able to talk about that commitment in any professional or social situation in which I find myself.

Friday night before the Dyke March, several members of a local Queer Jewish community met up for a Shabbat potluck. After dinner, another member of the community, whom I had met several times but do not know on a personal level, asked me very warmly what my plans were for the summer. I told her that my biggest plan is to get married in a few weeks. She smiled excitedly and paused as she carefully chose her next words so as to avoid assumptions about the gender of my betrothed. “And, is your fiancée here?” she asked.

“No, he is at a friend’s place tonight,” I responded, as my entire body filled with waves of emotion. What simple questions. In the past several weeks and months, I have repeated similar conversations several times. Telling people I’m getting married. Answering follow-up questions. Sometimes I am the first to express my partner’s gender, sometimes the other person does, indeed, make assumptions. But honestly, most of the time, I don’t notice.

This simple, safe, and supportive conversation with a fellow community member emphasized for me the heterosexual privilege I have benefited from during these several conversations about my wedding: I can talk about it wherever and whenever I choose. My physical, emotional, and professional safety is not on the line in these conversations. I don’t have to hold myself back and wonder if bringing up this topic would be taking too much of a risk. When I want to tell someone, when I want to refer to the wedding or bring it up, I can. Even by blogging about my wedding, by being so public about making this serious commitment to a “heterosexual lifestyle,” I am exercising privilege. I did not have to think through what this blogging choice would mean for my career, my public image, my family’s comfort, in the same way that I might have thought through it if the phrase “my partner” was followed-up with pronouns other than he, him, and his.

When I finished the conversation with the community member at the potluck, I looked around me for a few moments and then wandered away from the group, sat down by a tree, and sobbed. The weight of the moment, the weight of all those moments of casual conversation that had filtered through my personal and professional life throughout this period of engagement and wedding-planning, had hit me.

I think one of the reasons it hit me so hard is that this is a privilege I haven’t figured out how to use yet. I haven’t figured out how to share the “I’m [getting] married to a man” news and, in the same conversation, express my feminist values and queer politics and do or say something as a queer ally. I also haven’t figured out exactly how marriage will change the social aspects of this privilege. I know that there are legal, religious and material privileges that will come with marriage to a man — and I hope to share my thoughts on those in a different post — but there is also a different set of social privileges that come with marriage. Once I no longer have a boyfriend and do have a husband, how will that affect my social and professional standing? Furthermore, what responsibilities can I take on to be an even stronger ally for people who do not have access to those privileges?

I am about to enter one of the most cherished socially constructed privileges that a person can acquire in this heterosexist, patriarchal society. The question I want to address is, what can I do to foster critical self-awareness of that privilege and to doubly dedicate myself to eradicating the structures of power and oppression that have created it?