December 16, 2014 - 19:25
A lot came up for me in my meeting with Anne, Kristin, and Sara, as well as in the time I spent beforehand, preparing. I was finally able to put a name to what it was that made this semester-long experience so special.
I have been incredibly privileged as far as my education on identity and social justice goes. Since elementary school, where we studied such curricula as “Justice & Dissent” for years at a time, I have been exposed to an incredibly liberal environment full of politically aware adults and peers. In high school, I studied identity and social justice from a theatrical perspective, and in my pre-orientation to the Tri-Co, the work became more personal. I learned how to talk about myself and the privilege (and lack thereof) I had access to as a result of my many identities. Taking this 360 was an obvious next step for me, and didn’t initially sound to me much different from the work I had already spent my entire life doing. But it was. Finally I was in a space where my subjective experiences of identity, privilege, and marginalization were essential not just informally and for a short period of time, but academically, theoretically, and for an entire semester. Writing for the cluster was fun because it mattered, and because it allowed me to know that I mattered. As fortunate as I have been to transition straight from my liberal Cambridge bubble to my Bryn Mawr one, I never realized how much I truly mattered, both to myself and to those around me. In the Identity Matters classes, I could talk interchangeably about theory and about my subjective experience, without being concerned that I was getting “too personal,” or having to worry later about saying something for which someone might have judged me. The environment was truly perfect in a number of ways.
I also—I can’t say this enough, and I’ve said it so many times—really began to process how to work with silence. I so often find myself entering identity-based classes that I can relate to personally, as an outlet through which to discuss my own marginality and its theoretical components. However, entering a class like Disability, Identity, and Culture was completely different. When I began the class, I saw myself very decisively as able-bodied, and for this reason had to find my place in discussions. In speaking about the experiences of others (especially from an anthropological standpoint, which comes with so much privilege and carries so much weight of colonialism with it), you have to be so very careful. I watched myself become a much better listener, reader, and thinker, simply because I was so carefully paying attention to what other people had to say about experiences of disability. I was silent, without being silenced. When I wrote my first intersectionality paper and tried to answer whether or not transgender bodies were necessarily disabled, I began to question my own able-bodied identification. Though I still don’t have a conclusive answer, I have become much more comfortable making the association for myself between my gendered body and disability, and thus find it easier to speak in conversations on disability.
Once you do something like this 360, you can’t give it up. Not because it’s a responsibility (and in many ways it does feel like it is), but because it has truly become a lifestyle. You just can’t think about identity and the world’s injustices for so many hours a week and not do something about it, not let it completely alter the way you live your life. I entered college with a passion for theatre for social justice, and as unrelated as this cluster seemed to be to performance, my passion is stronger than it has ever been. Since beginning this semester, my mental health has improved dramatically. I’ve found real purpose in what I’m doing, even throughout the hard emotional work we’ve done, and come out with actual products of our labors. I’m so grateful for all of it.