It's a woman thing, you wouldn't understand...

So this week is my last week of classes - yahoo - though am also kind of sad, but I still have my MITclass for an extra two weeks. When I arrived in class yesterday, the prof hadn't had time to coordinate the day's speaker. It was going to be about dance as a media form - and I had actually spent too much time on the assignment - choosing a type of dance and finding historical transformations of the dance form on YouTube - I chose English Country Dance/Contra Dance/Square Dance - including in Japan.

Anyway, so the prof apologized for not following up with the guest speaker - he is crazy busy - writing books, a daily blog, coordinating grants, organizing conferences - so before he dismissed us and giving us the day off, he asked for feedback from the class about the previous week-end's conference - I hadn't gone, but most of the grad students in cms-had - a woman in our class - a fulbright scholar from Russia who is writing her dissertation on Harry Potter fan fiction - asked Henry about a comment at the conference about a problem with gender at the conference. I was shocked on a few fronts.

First, the prof, who was probably just exhausted, but just went off on how ridiculous this comment was - there were more women there than men - they had even balance of gender on the panels, etc. etc. I wasn't there, so who knows what the exact context was - my sense, though, was that it's possible to have a scientific equality in gender but an imbalance in power - discrimination and sexism is so internalized, but my prof almost exclaimed, "There was a microphone there - there was nothing stopping her from speaking up - or any woman from saying whatever they want - and if there was then it is her own issues not related to the conference." In some ways, he's right, discrimination is larger than any one event - but because it does exist - then we need to be open to hearing those critiques. But his defensiveness was frightening to me and made me realize the possible connection to his theory that people make of media what they want and it is not this big ubiquitous injected needle of dogma shoved into us - I think it is much more nuanced - and some of both happen - and there is internalized oppression of women.

But as I discussed in an earlier post about our mid-career women's seminar discussion about younger women not realizing there is discrimination, really - or caring about feminism - what was really striking was this Russian woman's response after the class when I asked her about gender issues from her experience - she was dismissive - she basically said there is no problem, that it doesn't exist and even if it did historically in Russia, noone did anything about it - or could do anything about it. Wow! She's 26 years old. Where is the woman's movement? Are we all just attached to past discrimination? I don't think so, but what happens when women don't get it? Is it purely a class thing, rather than just a women's thing?