An Open Letter on Female Participation
I am in my last semester at Bard and want to reflect on the gender divide that exists on our campus. This year in particular seems to bring to the surface a lot of this institution’s underlying issues. For the past four years, I have been involved in and in charge of many events promoting women on this campus. I’d like to share my perspective as I leave Bard no more changed than it was when I got here. The purpose of this letter is to officially state much of what has been spoken only amongst women, to bring an insular conversation to the public. I wish to encourage more women to be present members of our community.
In my junior year, there was an all-male photo show held in Woods studio. This show offended a lot of female photo majors and the arts community alike. In reaction to this, the feminist art club Through the Flower was formed. A few weeks later Through the Flower had a group of women working on a zine with art and writing created by the women at Bard. The launch party for the zine, full of performances and videos made by women, was well attended and an overall success. I was featured in the issue and had never seen work from most the women featured alongside me.
A few months later, posters went up all around campus calling for submission for the following issues. Yet, Through the Flower 2.0 was never released because they did not receive enough submissions to publish.
Earlier this semester, there was another all-male show but this time in studio arts and film. Once again the women of Bard, and most everyone else, were offended by this. There were plenty of comments on the internet drawing attention to the show’s all-straight, all-white, all-male participants. The show still happened, and was supposedly well attended.
A few days after the advertisements for the show were posted, I received a Facebook invite for a different studio art show in Fischer. The list of participants for this show were mostly women and I thought it might be reactionary. But, I was wrong. It was simply a class show: a genuine depiction of the gender make-up of the studio arts department.
In the past few weeks, for those of you who haven’t been invited, a new Facebook group has sprung up in response to a frustration of the undiscussed inequalities permeating our very liberal college. This group, originally called Bard: Girls, now goes under the title Bard: No Boys Allowed to allow participation of those who share similar feelings but do not identify within the gender binary. The intentions of this group seem to be misguided. Some members want the group to be a space to promote and advertise positive aspects and spaces in our community, while others have turned it into a space for complaints and cries for help to the mostly inactive 300 members.
This may be a classic case of whoever speaks the loudest gets their voices heard. I know for a fact that the opinions most present on the page, while they may reflect some of the student body, do not represent any sort of diverse whole. The form of Facebook posting, hidden behind computer screens, can be misconstrued as action. Clicking “post” to an unknown group of internet avatars is a safe but passive way of connecting. There is no back and forth, there is no real action. The more we privately talk with our friends and obsess over what hurts us, these issues continue to exist in a cycle that makes us believe we cannot change the realities we face. We tend to loose agency when we speak about action more than we actually do. There is nothing wrong with a place where women can express what ails them, but it can’t stop there.
In a school with many genius female professors and a predominantly female student body, one would think our numbers would be clearly represented in shows, publications, activism and participation by women in student life in general. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to matter the amount of bodies on campus. It’s a matter of who feels the most confident and encouraged to participate.
I hesitate to say that this is a problem of finding opportunities to participate, being a current head and long time member of the female film and video club Joanie4Jackie and past member of Through the Flower. There are opportunities and facilities for women at this school but very few women actually show up or feel inclined to organize. It’s an age old problem of institutionalized inequality that plants a sense of inferiority in women’s psyches.
This issue of a lack of participation goes across the whole of Bard. Many people have held events, shows, screenings, and meetings that spoke exactly to what the student body requested and the turn outs have been a disappointment. The feeling of being too cool to show up plagues all genders at Bard but it seems most important for women to step up while we have the chance. This is the moment we have to call people out, to change the minds of this school. After we graduate we will most likely all work in male-dominated industries where our presence will be constantly outnumbered. While we have the overwhelming amount of possible participants we need to start encouraging as many people as possible to actually show up.
As a senior, a feminist, and an active member in trying to make Bard a more positive place for women, and personally to make it a more positive place for women artists, it is extremely important for the work I know you are making, the ideas I know you are having and the issues I know you face to be made public. Things like the Facebook group are a good start for a place to spawn a real life community at Bard where we can start to see women supporting each other on our campus. On the flip side, we need to be more comfortable calling out those communities on campus that exclude us and forget we are apart of this college. No group show should be able to claim they simply organized with a group their friends when they all happen to be straight white men. They can still be our friends, our roommates, our boyfriends, our partners, our collaborators, but all in all, they still need to be called out or abandoned if they continue to ignore our presence.
Let’s all leave our fear of being disliked by the men at Bard behind, and start creating a community that works to change the institutionalized inequality we see all around us.
gummygunk
germansingergirl
snowghoul
areudirty