Skylar was born a girl, meaning they were assigned female at birth by their doctors. Today, Skylar identifies as male. Their preferred pronouns are he/him or they/them.

I raised Skylar as a girl. Up until a few years ago, they were, in my mind, unequivocally my daughter. Long hair and pretty dresses were their thing, but so were hunting for bugs, dreaming of dinosaurs, and digging in the dirt. I didn’t expect Skylar to play with dolls, or for them to be a princess on Halloween when they preferred Legos and Dracula costumes. Skylar’s preferences often swung toward what society might deem boyish things, but then again, they were a sucker for a skirt they could really twirl in.

Skylar didn’t come to me as a young child and proclaim that they were not a girl or that they felt like they were born into the wrong body. In fact, there were no conversations with Skylar regarding them not feeling in alignment with the sex and gender of their birth until puberty.

When Skylar did begin to express feelings of being transgender, it wasn’t easy for me. I felt incredible internal resistance, even loss. But I also knew that Skylar did feel safe enough to explore these feelings and to lean on me for guidance and support.

Now, Skylar is moving out, leaving California for Oregon. As they get ready to launch, it makes me question if my parenting, which looking back, might be labeled gender neutral, has prepared them for a world outside our family’s orbit—a world where gender roles are fraught with divisiveness.

The word neutral has many meanings: indifferent, impartial, disengaged. When you talk about neutrality in terms of parenting, it means something completely different. In the past few years, there has been a growing resurrection of the conversation around gender-neutral or gender-responsive parenting.

This kind of parenting was already a thing by the early ’70s, when I was a quintessential girl: shy and bookish, I hated sports, loved my dolls, and could spend a perfect summer afternoon watching soap operas with my grandma. My mom was an interesting mix of traditional and hippie who insisted on good manners and “ladylike” behavior, but who also wanted me and my sister to be original thinkers and stand on our own two feet.

When Skylar was growing up, Erin M. Eichinger writes that she always encouraged them to be “free” to be themselves: someone who loved to twirl in skirts and hunt for bugs.

Eichinger set out to raise Skylar (pictured) and her other three children with an awareness of gender identities that are “unique, fluid, and complex.”

Looking back, Eichinger writes that she wouldn’t change much about her parenting style, aside from being even more conscious and intentional around language and her attitudes surrounding gender roles.

When I was around 5, Mom gave me a copy of the children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which came out in 1972.

At the heart of the album was a message about gender-neutral parenting that encouraged kids and adults to see themselves in ways that broke loose from rigid notions of what it meant to be a boy or a girl. Boys can play with dolls. Girls can run fast.  And, it’s okay for all of us to cry.   Tapping into the Gloria Steinem-style feminism of the time, the album was a reaction to a hyper-gendered postwar America, where marketers painted everything in shades of pink or blue.

Free to Be You and Me provided a new vision of how things could be. I wore that record out, playing it on my white suitcase record player until I knew every song and story by heart.

About 25 years passed from the first time I listened to the album to when I became a mom myself. My approach to parenting my three step kids and Skylar, my first and only born, turned out to be fairly gender neutral. I taught my kids that boys and girls are a lot more alike than they are different. I encouraged them to be “free” to wear whatever they like; play however they like and be however they like.

I was winging it, with Free to Be You and Me as my compass.

Skylar hopes to be a parent themselves one day, and their thoughts on gender-neutral parenting are interesting: “I would keep things neutral when it comes to my child. I would use neutral pronouns, names, toys, and clothes.”

While Skylar realizes that total neutrality would be an impossibility, they would try, at least with those in the child’s inner circle, to maintain as neutral an environment as possible.

If this caused confusion, once the child had more contact with people outside their family group,  Skylar feels that it could be a launching point for communication. “It would be a way to talk to them about gender from a young age, like kids who are raised always knowing they are adopted. They may not understand the concept when they are little, but once they do, there is no fear around it.”

Many people seem to think gender neutrality is something completely new and foreign.

What I’ve come to believe is that we have a generation of young people who are giving us a new lexicon surrounding gender. They are not describing a new phenomenon; they are, as historian Laura Lovett has noted, “resuscitating an old movement, not creating a new one.”

As far as public discussions around gender go, we have made great strides, and yet with that, comes pushback. In 2024, there have been more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 43 states. In Florida, the state board of medicine is acting to block any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18, even with parental consent. In California, Elon Musk announced he’d be moving his Space X headquarters out of the state. This, in response to a bill that bans teachers from forcibly outing transgender students to their families. Musk is the father of a transgender daughter from whom he is estranged, and he blames her California private school education for “making her trans.”

Gender roles are imprecise, constantly changing, and ever-evolving. Because of this nebulous quality, they are often confusing and even misleading. As a pushback to what they see as socially imposed rules, some parents today are taking the concept of neutrality in parenting even further, a strict concealment of their baby’s gender from all but a small circle of caretakers. In doing so, they aim to make the child’s formative years completely free of gender markers or stereotypes. Think gender-neutral names, clothing, and toys. Definitely no gender-reveal parties. At some point, the thinking goes, the child will naturally express their gender with no need for any outside influence.

This reminds me of the widely read short story about “Baby X,” a fictional child whose gender is revealed to only a select few. The piece was published in Ms. magazine in 1978, just a few years after Free to Be You and Me—and it pushed readers to question the impact gender roles have on children and society at large.

While my approach of raising children with an awareness of gender identities that are unique, fluid, and complex feels right, the idea of raising kids with total neutrality seems unnecessary to me. I wonder if the practice could be needlessly confusing, leading to misinterpretations and misunderstanding for the child and those who love them, not to mention the level of watchfulness required on the parent’s part.

If I had the chance to raise Skylar again, I am not sure I would change my parenting style. Maybe I would be more conscious around language or more intentional about my attitudes surrounding gender roles.

Here’s the tricky part about raising kids: If you do a good job, the reward is that they become one of your favorite people in the whole world. The other reward is that they learn to stand on their own two feet. And then, they leave you.

So, you help them leave. You break your own heart in service of their future and you wonder if you have prepared them for the world out there.

So, here I am, helping my child take their next step. As I look into the proverbial rearview mirror, to the kid Skylar was, and to the adult they are becoming, I can only hope I prepared them well. I hope too, that when they look into the mirror, they see what I see: a funny, loving, wicked smart, and compassionate person.

What else could a parent want for their child?

The post Parenting Beyond the Gender Binary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In March 2020, I stopped cutting my hair. Like many, I wasn’t about to risk a COVID infection for a trip to Floyd’s barbershop. Unlike many, however, I have yet to return to the barbershop chair. I am now 41, my hair falls halfway down my back, and I have almost no clue what to do with it.

I never intended to go four years without a haircut. I teach fourth grade. During year one of the pandemic, in the name of social distancing, our school halved class sizes and moved us into a gymnasium. Suddenly I had 13 students, polished wooden floors, and a regulation basketball net overhead. We ended each day with the Rocky theme song and a session shooting hoops.

If all 13 students made shots consecutively, I told them, I’d go home, cut my hair, and donate it. We graphed their collective progress as a math exercise. In year two of the pandemic, I made a similar deal with my new class. And the next. And again, this past year. You can guess my students’ accuracy from the length of my hair.

As my hair grew, however, I learned that although it had been with me for four decades, I really didn’t know it. I didn’t know how to care for it or style it. I didn’t know how to deal with the escapees that showed up in my shower drain, my keyboard, my headphones, my floor.

My first pandemic school picture day, I made an attempt at presentability with a fine-toothed travel comb I found at the bottom of a bathroom vanity. The result was a frizzy poof with the consistency of high-grade fairground cotton candy. We were in line when a student asked me,

“You’re getting your picture taken like that?”

“What should I do?” I replied.

“Put it up.”

If you flip to the faculty pages of our 2020-2021 yearbook, you will agree that I should have taken her advice.

Hair-care manuals abound. I know because I have borrowed all of them from the McArthur Public Library of Biddeford, Maine. But as a teacher, I know that humans learn best by observing others: parents, siblings, friends, siblings of friends. They teach us, through example and instruction, how to tie our shoes, how to talk to girls, how to roll a joint, and everything else that’s important about growing up.

Because long hair is an almost exclusively female trait in America, the cultural knowledge of caring for long hair is passed down almost exclusively between women. Four of my female students, in 2022, spent an hour every Wednesday in an American Girl Dolls after-school “enrichment” class where they made crafts and styled their dolls’ hair. At 10 years old, these girls had spent more time with doll hair than I’d spent on my real hair.

I arrived at middle age without knowing how to do something as simple as combing my hair without making tangles worse. How do I put my hair back without unsightly strands escaping the elastic? How to manage the frizz? What the hell am I supposed to do with the short wispy hairs sticking up every which way?

“Oh, those are called flyaways,” a friend’s sister told me.

“Fly-aways,” I repeated softly, as if learning a new language—which I was.

I learned how to dry my hair at age 40. I was at a Fourth of July party. A female friend was aghast—no other word can describe her precise facial expression—after I mimed the three-step post-shower process I’d practiced my entire life:

Bunch towel in hands
Place bunched towel on wet head
Rub towel as violently as possible

Turns out this is not the best way to dry long hair. This is the best way to damage long hair. The proper way to dry long hair requires the tender patience you might employ upon rescuing a litter of frightened newborn bunnies from a rainstorm. Pat gently. Squeeze ever-so-lightly with a soft towel. Allow plenty of time to air-dry. Blow-dry if you must, keeping the heat six to eight inches from the fur, to avoid overdried patches.

The French Revolution ushered in a wave of short hairdos with names like La Bastille and La Sacrifice and La Victime. The last featured a close shave to the nape of the neck, then a “shingling” of the hair up the back of the head. It mimicked the cut nobility received prior to being guillotined—hence “The Victim”—to provide the executioner with the best line of sight. The public often accompanied La Victime with a red ribbon tied around the neck—celebrating the destruction of the ruling class. All the popular styles during the French Revolution were short. Long hair was a sign of royalty. Leisure. Excess.

I get it: Long hair takes time. Investment. Practice. Product. Help.

After four years with long hair, I’ve learned a few things. Some activities are less enjoyable (pushups, middle-of-the-night pillow adjustments, walking with wind at my back, driving with the windows down, eating cereal) while other activities are more enjoyable (skateboarding, headbanging, pond hockey, imitating that scary girl from The Ring).

I still don’t know if there’s any grand significance to being a man in middle age with a head of long hair. Some days I see my hair as a symbol of confidence: look at me, unbothered by gender norms, unconcerned with social conventions, comfortable with who I am, grateful for the genetics that allow me to push out roots while I still can. Other days, I wonder if my hair is a blinking reminder of my insecurities: my age, my vanity, my masculinity, my privilege, my desire to be taken even a little bit seriously.

School picture day always seems to arrive a little bit sooner than the year before. By the next one, will I have my fly-aways under control? Will I even have long hair? I don’t know. But what I do know is that my long hair has taught me that, halfway through life, I’m still getting to know myself.

The post How I Learned to Blowdry My Hair at 40 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1870, Ernest Fanny Boulton and Frederick Stella Park were arrested in London. Their crime? Presenting as women outside their theatrical act.

Fanny and Stella had appeared in newspapers before, known for their colorful personas as entertainers, sometimes praised and sometimes criticized for their performances. Boulton was revered for being the “best amateur performer off the boards,” while Park had a talent for interpreting matrons, dowagers, and old women in pantomimes. As long as their gender-bending impersonating talents were put to the good use of gentlemanly entertainment, there was nothing wrong with their behavior.

But this time, they were written up because the police had decided that their performance had gone too far: they carried their feminine personas from the stage onto the street. Fanny and Stella were arrested with a “potential suitor,” a young wealthy man seemingly unaware of the identities of the two. They were wearing their finest attire—Stella, a cerise satin dress with an open square body and a silk scarf wrapped around her neck; Fanny, a green embroidered gown paired with golden-plaited hair in Greek style (as reported by the arresting officer)—when they were charged with public indecency for luring wealthy men under false pretenses.

Boulton and Park were neither the first nor the last crossdressers in Victorian Britain. At the time, it was not unusual to see men playing women on stage. The word “drag” was invented as an acronym back in the 16th century to describe the phenomenon of men “Dressed Resembling A Girl” to interpret female theatrical roles on stage, as women were not allowed to be actors during this period.

Fanny and Stella, photographed by Frederick Spalding about a year before their trial in 1870. Public domain.

But Fanny and Stella weren’t mere cross-dressing actors: they also lived public lives as women as often as they did as men. Sometimes, they attended society outings as Frederick and Ernest, but other times they showed up in satin dresses and white gloves, kept their plaited wigs on and behaved with all the mannerisms of upper-class women of their time.

Today, politicized digital media and viral videos subject trans and non-binary individuals to unwarranted, sensationalized scrutiny—sometimes putting their lives at risk. While the technology to carry out systematic scrutiny and online verbal attacks is relatively new, the public appetite towards making trans-focused stories a matter of public safety has been there since the Boulton and Park trial in the 19th century, if not before.

Boulton and Park’s trial aimed to establish exactly what type of danger the pair posed—whether the unspeakable act of sodomy (homosexuality as a concept we know today still was in its infancy) or maybe theft and deception, the latter a fear stemmed from a common type of highway robbery in which carriage drivers stopped to help a damsel in distress only to be robbed at gunpoint by thieves in disguise.

First, a medical professional was called in to prove sodomy, subjecting Boulton and Park to an invasive physical procedure. When that was inconclusive, they turned to a lengthy trial to determine whether the pair’s double identity could constitute a crime.

Side by side the courtroom trial was an equally relentless trial by media. The legal proceedings only took on their full significance as newspapers and tabloids turned Fanny and Stella into a spectacle, emphasizing the oddity of the two “women personators”—as they referred to them—to sell copies. Thanks to the reach of print media at the time, the pictures and sensational details from the trial were broadcast up to the remotest corners of the nation. While Victorians may not have had television, let alone TikTok, to keep up with trending videos, trial illustrations circulated so rapidly that people could feel they were present at the tribunal, watching as the events unfolded live.

Early in the trial, cartoonists drew Fanny and Stella with feminine features, indistinguishable from other women. In the sketch showing their arrest on Bow Street, they were graceful figures whose appearance suggested nothing unusual or wrong. Without prior knowledge of the context, one might assume they were ladies of respectable society. But as the trial proceeded, and a public appetite for news of Fanny and Stella grew, the media’s depiction of the women shifted significantly. Increasingly, Fanny and Stella were depicted as grotesque, their masculine features emphasized and their faces frowning, mugshot-like.

The press coverage also fueled harassment of others. A remark by the unforgiving press about Fanny and Stella wearing long-haired wigs while in the privacy of their homes, for instance, quickly was printed in the tabloids. In the days following, readers across the nation heckled and harassed those who they suspected were wearing a wig. Meanwhile, columns in the daily press such as Dundee Courier and Newry Reporter reported a craze of normal citizens in “eccentric clothing” being harassed on the streets.

By transforming an otherwise trivial case into a public sensation, the media outlets gave people ammunition with which to judge and execute fellow citizens who didn’t conform to the societal standards of gender and appearance. From London to Edinburgh, and metropolitan Liverpool to rural Cornwall, Fanny and Stella, in their visible queerness, become a new symbol of what to fear. The relentless debate fueled by the media cost Fanny and Stella—along with countless others—their freedom.

Today, Fanny and Stella’s trial is being replayed repeatedly in regard to restrooms, drag story hours, and participation in sports. Trans people don’t need to be thrust into a court of law to face incessant judgement, misgendering, and abuse. Simply existing is grounds to be dragged, unwillingly, into the public eye.

Whenever the conversation sparks, be it on a right-wing or left-leaning outlet, the media and the public draw connections between trans women’s gender identity and their intrinsic danger. As a result, trans women are at risk of attack, as was the case for Lauren Jackson, who was beaten up while walking toward the female restrooms at a state beach in Oregon by an attacker who was emboldened and (mis)informed by extreme right-wing outlets.

In the blink of an eye, new examples of how we are failing genderqueer and trans people come up: most recently, the death of non-binary student Nex Benedict brought the news flow to a halt, forcing the media to grapple with the connection between hatred, online and offline, and how it disproportionately affects queer and non-binary people.

In Fanny and Stella’s case, one cartoon unexpectedly changed the destiny of the trial and turned it into farce. In the sketch, officers are depicted searching through the two ladies’ dressing rooms, garment by garment, looking for incriminating evidence to establish whether their attire could be considered theatrical props (which would make the defendants innocent) or proper ladies’ frocks (rendering them guilty). Presented with this surreal scene, public opinion shifted. Rather than treating it as a criminal case involving sodomy at the very least and possibly treason, they recognized the trivial hair-splitting nature of the case, and the rage subsided toward Fanny and Stella and their alleged criminal capabilities. When the next paper installment came out, and politicians moved on to other campaign-winning topics, they had already moved on.

It is time people face today’s similar absurdity, and acknowledge that marathon losers (trans athletes receiving a disproportionate attention, considering they constitute the 0.0003%), as well as bathroom users, are simply people just going about their daily lives. By debating private lives as topics of public concern, we jeopardize the already precarious safety and existence of those involved. By elevating everyday instances to priority politics, we play a risky game and obscure the real issues politicians should spend their time on, instead of focusing on what’s inside people’s knickers.

When we allow gender affirmation to be presented as an issue of protecting public safety, we allow trans people to be scapegoated across all areas of public life, from public spaces to sports and education. The absurdity is worthy of mockery, but the dangers are infinite.

The post When Victorian Newspapers Put Gender-Bending on Trial appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions early this summer thanks in large part to the charge that Harvard’s practice of race-conscious admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. Whether or not the decision changes the college application process for Asian Americans, it certainly obscures the more insidious and widespread forms of bias that many Asian Americans face. It also opened up pathways to dismantling race-conscious policies elsewhere—particularly in the workplace, where assumptions about what makes a good leader are couched in ideas of race.

Asian Americans are not underrepresented in university classrooms, including at Harvard. They account for 7.2% of the U.S. population, yet 29.9% of Harvard’s incoming class. Where they are underrepresented is in the boardroom and the C-suite. Among the Fortune 500, only 2.4% of CEOs are Asian, two-thirds of whom are South Asian (with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and mainly from India). Many Asian Americans—and especially East Asians (with origins in China, Korea, and Japan)—find themselves hitting a “bamboo ceiling” akin to the glass ceiling that women face. It’s here, in the workplace, where affirmative action has an important role to play in the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans—one that the Court has put in jeopardy.

Asian Americans lag behind all racial, ethnic, and gender groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Even in fields in which Asians are overrepresented, such as technology, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, and law, they are rare in leadership.

In top technology firms in Silicon Valley, white men and women are twice as likely as Asian men and women to advance into the executive ranks. Between 1997 and 2008, Asian Americans made up 20% of medical school faculty—yet there were no Asian American deans. And while Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the field, Asian Americans are the only racial group that accounts for a much smaller share of medical school department chairs than their percentage of the faculty in medical schools.

A similar pattern emerges in law: Asians comprise 10% of graduates of top-30 law schools, but only 6.5% of all federal judicial law clerks. And while Asians are the largest non-white group in major law firms, they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest ratio of associates to partners of all groups at four-to-one, compared to two-to-one for Blacks and Latinos, and parity for whites. Even in academia, where Asian Americans are overrepresented as students in top universities, they are nearly absent in leadership ranks, comprising only 1.5% of college presidents.

So what forms the branches of the bamboo ceiling?

Some argue that racial and gender stereotypes—technically strong but socially weak, mathematically and scientifically inclined rather than verbally gifted—hinder Asians’ advancement in the workplace. Employers may recognize Asian Americans for their hard work, dedication, and effort without seeing them as innately brilliant, visionary, or skilled to lead.

Asian American women are doubly disadvantaged in this regard: They are the least likely group to be promoted to leadership positions, and to be perceived as fit for leadership roles regardless of their education, experience, and behavior.

Where do these stereotypes come from, and what can be done to combat them? A new strand of research points to differences in culture, and, more specifically, differences in verbal assertiveness between East Asian and white Americans. Western corporate culture prizes individual assertiveness and achievement, whereas East Asian culture promotes harmony and the stability of interpersonal relationships.

To buttress this point, researchers find that South Asians are more verbally assertive than East Asians, and, despite still not being as represented as white men in top positions, South Asian men are now even more likely than white men to attain leadership positions—pointing to a unique pattern of “South Asian exceptionalism.” A similar pattern emerges in law and business schools, where South Asians outperform East Asians in leadership, strategy, and marketing—courses in which verbal assertiveness is prized and class participation accounts for a larger percentage of the final grade. The branches of the bamboo ceiling begin to grow in the classroom.

South Asian exceptionalism may also be explained by Americans’ understanding of who counts as Asian. In the U.S., “Asian” is often shorthand for East Asian, and most Americans—including most Asian Americans—exclude South Asians from the fold. If the stereotypical perception of Asian men (i.e., East Asian men) is that they are diffident, passive, and distant, South Asian men (who are not perceived as Asian) may not be hampered by a social identity that presumes these qualities. The absence of the stereotype may change both their behavior and the way others interpret that behavior.

But a larger question underlying this debate is why we assume that leaders must be bold, brash, and assertive to be effective. Some of the country’s top CEOs have been described as listeners first, and team players who are empathetic, thoughtful, steady, and measured. Columbia University’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is the first woman to lead the university in its 269-year history. When asked about her leadership style, she quoted the 6th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist … When the leader’s work is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Thinking more expansively about the qualities that make a good leader while recognizing that different leadership models may be just as effective (if not more so) than traditional Western ones will broaden leadership opportunities for not only East Asians, but also women, and for many of us who do not fit the prototype of what an American leader looks or acts like. It would also benefit the members of such leaders’ organizations, who may work more effectively with more diverse managers and styles. Leadership comes in many forms, and recognizing and rewarding this will better prepare us to lead and serve the diverse country that we are.

It is the recognition of race, ethnicity, and gender that enables us to identify biases in our understanding of who makes a suitable CEO, president, chair, dean, or manager. Affirmative action policies in the workplace give us the tools to address these biases and remove the barriers they create. Now, even these policies are coming under attack, led by no less than the same conservative advocate who engineered the lawsuit against Harvard.

The fight to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions was never about protecting Asian Americans, yet profiling them abetted the demise of the policy. It also veiled the more rampant forms of bias that Asian Americans face that impede their career mobility. Affirmative action in the workplace paved the way for white women to shatter and break through the glass ceiling. It can help non-white professionals—including Asian Americans—do the same.

The post Where Asian Americans Need Affirmative Action appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2018, I was interviewed for Univision’s morning talk show ¡Despierta América! (Wake up, America!) to discuss the meaning of the identity label Latinx. I was nervous because I had never discussed gender and sexuality in a “formal” Spanish setting, let alone on national television—I mean, my 92-year-old abuelita was going to be watching! At the end, the reporter asked if I identified with the term Latinx. I knew what he was asking: Are you, personally, gender fluid? I surprised myself when I replied “yes” without pause. It was the first time I had publicly affirmed my non-binary identity.

In the months that followed, I would have several conversations with family and friends about what this meant for me, what pronouns I would now use, and how we would have patience with each other in learning and moving forward. Patience was necessary, given that the debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has gone in dizzying circles. Since the term Latinx gained popularity in 2016, it and its variations (for me, Latine offers more phonetic fluidity)—have become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders, and sexual identities.

But the debates largely miss the point: whether one prefers to use Latinx or Latine, both terms recognize and honor the presence of gender-fluid identities. What is most striking about these “debates” is that they rarely (if ever) center the voices and experiences of those who do identify with the term—namely, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid Latine communities.

The linguistic debate on Latinx, then, serves as a useful example to understand the transphobia prevalent in our community and the importance of adopting language that better reflects our communities writ large.

Critics of the term Latinx often cite linguistic purity and Spanish heritage for their critiques. Some claim that Latinx is an abomination to the Spanish language because it does not follow proper grammar or phonology, noting that the “o” in Latino—or any other identity label such as dominicano, chileno, mexicano, for example—is already inclusive of the collective.

While this argument may be grammatically “correct” according to mainstream Spanish, it does not take into account the invisibilities the “o” creates. Latinx provides a linguistic vehicle to represent gender fluid experiences and to organize these communities under an inclusive umbrella. However, some people use Latinx as a catch-all term since the x can be a stand-in for any of the other identities: -a, -e, and -o.

The critiques also ignore the political context. In my research on queer and trans Latine communities, I first noticed the use of the “x” in my fieldwork in 2016 when community organizers were debating more inclusive language in their social media presence. Some have also cited the emergence of Latinx after the tragic Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida, when media outlets faced having to accurately represent the diverse gender identities of the victims.

This expansion and reconsideration of gender, it turns out, is of vital relevance to Latinx communities. In 2018, the GenForward Survey, housed at the University of Chicago, published a study on Millennials’ attitudes surrounding LGBTQ issues. The study found that while approximately 14% of Millennials in the U.S. identify as something other than straight or heterosexual, a greater number of Latinx Millennials identify as LGBTQ (22%) compared to African Americans (14%), whites (13%), and Asian Americans (9%). These numbers are also worth noting considering that Latines make up 19% of the U.S. population and are the youngest of any ethnic group in the country. As of 2019, the average age of a Latine person is 11, while the average age of a Black person is 27, 29 for an Asian person, and 58 for a white person. From this perspective, the future of Latine communities in the U.S. is looking a lot less heterosexual and cisgender.

But this inclusivity is exactly what critics of Latinx dislike. Last year, the Atlantic published an article claiming that staffers encourage Latino legislators to avoid the term because it is “divisive.” But the rationale of avoiding being divisive aims to create the illusion of a politically unified Latine voting bloc, as opposed to choosing to understand the complex experiences that are categorized unilaterally as “Latino.” For decades, both Congresspeople and Hollywood have discussed “struggling” with understanding the vastly diverse group of people that the terms Latina/e/o/x include. Calling attention to this diversity is precisely the point of Latinx.

Negating the term Latinx also contributes to an erasure of trans experiences that perpetuates violence. Currently, the rights of transgender communities across all races and ages in the U.S. are under attack—a forceful effort to erase the experiences of transgender people and deny them protections from discrimination. Trans women already experience greater employment discrimination than any other demographic: According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute “nearly half (48.8%) of transgender employees reported experiencing discrimination (being fired or not hired) based on their LGBT status compared to 27.8% of cisgender LGB employees.” On top of that, there is a growing rate of murders of trans Women of Color in the U.S.—In 2021, the Human Rights Campaign tracked a record 50 fatalities, an overwhelming number of whom were Black and/or Latina. In 2022, at least 38 trans people have been murdered; many additional cases go unreported or misreported.

Latine transgender communities also include a significant undocumented population, who face not only employment discrimination but further marginalization due to their legal status. For instance, in their study on trans Latinx health in California, trans activists and scholars Bamby Salcedo of TransLatin@ Coalition and Jack Caraves found that of the 129 participants they surveyed, 37% were undocumented, 26% were unemployed, and just 20% had full-time employment.

The insistence on rejecting the use of Latinx is a transphobic act because it denies trans Latine and Latinx people a term that represents them. When conservative leaders in our communities are the first to double down on that denial, it shows that they don’t see trans Latines as part of the communities they represent. For instance, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., claims that we should drop the use of the word altogether since so few people like it.

More recently, Republican congressperson María Elvira Salazar of Florida introduced an amendment to the House appropriations bill that would prevent the executive branch from referring to Latinos as Latinxs in official, public-facing documents, and preventing any funds from being allotted for producing documents that use “Latinx” or “Latin-x.” This tactic has also been used by non-Latinx leaders: Last month, on her first day in office as Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee banned the use of the term Latinx in all official state use. And early this month, a group of Hispanic Connecticut Democrats introduced a bill to follow suit.

Untangling fluid social constructs like language and gender can be challenging. But perhaps the point is not to untangle. Linguistic expressions hold so many possibilities in how people affirm themselves, their communities, and more importantly, how they can imagine other ways of identifying, loving, and being in the world. That’s where I see the power and hope in these language practices—the power in recognizing someone else’s beauty and their humanity. Whether the terms Latinx and Latine become widely adopted or not, both resist the urge to fall in line with the collective “o” in Latino and both enforce the idea that trans people do, in fact, exist in our communities. While changes in language may seem “difficult” for some, or unimportant for others, language is constantly shifting and evolving. The move to gender-inclusive language is a reminder and a call to action for all of us to actively engage with and recognize the experiences, struggles, and joy of transgender communities.

The post Why Is the Latinx Debate So Fierce? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over 20 years ago, I covered my face with my hands and shyly told my (now) husband, “I’m moving away for graduate school and I’d love you to go with me, but I want us to be married first.” After he agreed that it seemed like a great idea, we shopped together for an engagement ring before he chose one of the two I had liked best. He offered it to me from one knee a couple of months later in a “surprise” engagement. As a wife, I tell others he proposed. But as a social scientist who studies marriages and engagements, I’m not so sure.

Young, heterosexual adults increasingly prefer egalitarian relationships in which both partners work for pay and contribute equitably to childcare and domestic labor—even as they struggle to realize this balance. Equalizing the proposal—a single moment in time rather than an ever-changing, lifetime negotiation of labor—should be much easier. Still, the proposal process remains overwhelmingly a male responsibility—and privilege. The stubbornness of this seemingly last acceptable bastion of male control has a lot to tell us about gender, relationships, and the division of labor in 21st-century America.

Sociologist Sharon Sassler and I interviewed a number of cohabiting couples between the ages of 18 and 34 who were considering or in the process of discussing marriage with their partners. We explicitly asked them which partner should propose. We received a fair number of responses such as “Whomever wants,” especially from college-educated men and women. But when we changed the question slightly to “Who do YOU want to propose if the two of you get married?”, the response was overwhelmingly the male partner. And this remained true even among those who otherwise viewed their relationships as equal.

When we asked why, men and women alike expressed concerns that “flopping the question” would call into question long-established gender roles. “It’s just a manly job,” explained Terrell.* “It’s just natural.”

Nathan, who was committed to sharing the housework and financial responsibilities equally with his partner, Andrea, had just proposed. Although Andrea had been the one to initiate their move-in, he said of the wedding proposal: “I think it’s the guys’ job, not to be chauvinistic and old-fashioned. But I think I would have felt kind of like a putz if she would have proposed to me.”

Many women felt the same way. Tara told us, “I said, ‘If you don’t do it by a certain time, I’m just going to do it.’ But I don’t mean that, because I don’t want to do it ’cause then I’ll feel like masculine, and I don’t want to feel masculine.” Asked to elaborate, Tara said, “I’ve definitely been the initiator in some of our other circumstances that are traditionally I think male roles. This is just a big one. And because everyone will ask, ‘How did it happen?’ And I don’t want to say, ‘Well I did it.’ I can’t. It would kill me I think.”

Female proposals were not entirely out of the question. Dawn had planned to propose to Eric, only to be dissuaded by both her mother and Eric’s wishes. She said, “I’ve threatened to propose to him a few times. He’s like, ‘No, the man does it.’ I think he would feel unmanly if he didn’t do it. Yeah, I know that sounds weird from a guy that’s really liberal, but I just feel like he wants to—he wants control of the situation.”

Eric’s explanation was simpler: “I just see it as the guy should propose—the classic way.”

All of this, for one simple question. But the power to propose is not merely picking out the right place or time to ask those four little words. It’s the ability to determine the pace of the entire relationship. It stands to reason that if the male partner is the only one who can move the couples’ union into marriage, the female partner has only two choices: wait to be asked or leave. In this way, the man’s timeline determines the seriousness of the relationship, with couples often scarcely realizing just how much control that affords him. In fact, this kind of “hidden power,” which makes certain gender roles seem natural or inevitable, can continually and insidiously reinforce patriarchal norms without ever really being questioned.

So what’s a modern straight couple to do? What might a more equal proposal look like?

Well, for one, heterosexual cis couples could certainly look to their gay and lesbian counterparts. They often leave the power of the proposal to a decision reached through discussion before the partner who most wants to advance the relationship or who prefers to stand on ceremony is the one to propose. However, such a change requires overcoming centuries of tradition and internalized sexism.

More recently, “dual proposals” have begun to make the rounds on social media. In this model, each partner proposes, and each (hopefully!) accepts. Though, of course, this is not without its own challenges: Need the proposals occur on the same day? Who goes first? And is the engagement official after the first “Yes”?

As the age of marriage has risen over time in the U.S. to just over 30 for men and 28 for women and the institution has become more economically elite, a third possibility for the “new proposal” seems apparent. Far from being the blushing bride and fresh-faced groom leaving the family home, today’s betrothed couples typically already have established their own households—most often living together and perhaps even with children of their own. The pomp and circumstance of the engagement period that were designed to help provide a young couple with the goods necessary for setting up a new household, like hope chests, engagement parties, and bridal showers, are no longer a major factor. Now, marriage is a pinnacle marker of adulthood rather than its beginning. After discussing whether they wish to marry, couples could simply decide that they are engaged, no proposal needed. In fact, rather than spending money renting out the jumbotron or hiring the skywriter, they might choose to host a party announcing their engagement and celebrating all who have supported them along the way.

Human beings have agency—and with that, the power to choose to modify or reject social norms. If our society continues to promote the proposal as a nearly unquestionable male right, we will continue to go through great lengths to reach true egalitarianism. Regardless of when our engagement became “official,” in the end, my husband and I are no less married. We have crafted a life full of mutual admiration, equal sharing, and a whole lot of fun. The question will be, is the conventional start to that life together—a male proposal—a tradition that heterosexual couples want to eschew?

Saying “yes” to an overhaul of the marriage proposal might be beneficial not only to our own relationships, but for generations to come.

The post Who Should Put a Ring on It? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ezgulian is a well-respected figure in professional culinary circles who judges exclusive culinary competitions such as the Bocuse d’Or and champions women’s contributions to French cuisine. But she also maintains what we think of as housewife sensibilities, and has become one of France’s key figures in the “zero waste” cooking movement. “I believe in showing people how they can reinvent their leftovers or use ingredients they usually throw away,” she tells me as she moves around the kitchen.

And that’s when it hits me: What draws me to Sonia Ezgulian is how perfectly she reflects and subverts the tensions that exist in France between domestic and professional cooking. Women have always worked in French professional kitchens. But we hear about them and see them less often than men—in part, my research suggests, because women’s traditional ties to unpaid care work have sidelined them. Ezgulian manages to celebrate domestic cookery while creating a strong connection to professional culinary arts. She telegraphs the notion that women’s culinary accomplishments are equally important in restaurants and at home.

Ezgulian’s biography straddled the two spheres from the get-go. She never went to culinary school, deciding to become a professional cook after working for many years as a successful journalist in Paris. She and her husband Emmanuel moved to Lyon, Ezgulian’s hometown, and opened a small restaurant called Oxalis in 1999. The restaurant showcased Ezgulian’s creativity and playfulness in the kitchen, bringing new life to Lyonnais cuisine, which had a reputation for being stodgy and bourgeois. The local papers quickly touted Ezgulian as a new mère lyonnaise, a particular sort of domestic-turned-professional female cook.

Lyon, the third-largest city in France, has a long history of women cooking professionally. At the turn of the 20th century, many women worked as cooks in bourgeois homes there, but as the economy in France entered a downturn, many of them lost their jobs as domestic laborers and went to work in restaurants where they perfected dishes such as poularde en demi-deuil (truffled braised chicken) and fonds d’artichauts au foie gras (artichoke hearts with foie gras). These were simple, hearty dishes that exalted prestigious ingredients, the hallmarks of bourgeois cuisine. The women’s reputation for excellent cooking grew, and gastronomes such as Curnonsky, an early restaurant critic, began to call these women les mères lyonnaises (“Mothers of Lyon”). These cooks did not recognize each other as a unified group, but the growing genre of gastronomic literature about their food created a movement of sorts.

Sonia was befuddled by the mère label, because she did not see her cooking as part of the tradition of stodgy cuisine that had come to define Lyon. She was a woman in a restaurant kitchen. Was that all it took to be a mère?

The quintessential mère lyonnaise was Eugénie Brazier. Born in the countryside near Lyon, Brazier worked in a bourgeois home before apprenticing under the renowned mère Fillioux. Fillioux was as famous for her terse attitude toward her customers and staff as she was for her tableside service of whole chickens, which would fall apart at the tiniest cut from her dainty knife. Brazier went on to run two three-starred Michelin restaurants of her own in the 1930s, an accomplishment no other woman has yet replicated.

Eugénie Brazier died in 1977, and while she is an important cultural figure in Lyon, her memory largely remains relegated to the dusty annals of local gastronomic history. The rest of France and the world associates Lyon’s food with the recently deceased, homegrown, super-star chef Paul Bocuse, whose image graces the city’s murals.

French society charges women with being the central caregivers at home. Women who choose to pursue careers instead—as well as those who shoulder the double weight of professional careers and motherhood—face a robust glass ceiling in many professions. The culinary arts are no exception: The professionalization of cooking in France has largely focused on keeping women out of kitchens. The figure of the chef in popular culture is almost always represented as male. Starting in culinary school, women encounter structural barriers, gender stereotypes, and sometimes even sexual harassment. Many women report having their culinary instructors pass them over for top apprenticeship positions in favor of their male peers. Others are channeled into areas such as pastry, often referred to as the pink ghetto of the kitchen, which are seen as more creative and feminine. These problems are not uniquely French. But given the centrality of the culinary arts in French culture, the problem of gender inequality in the kitchen should be of national concern.

Ezgulian recalled her own feelings of exclusion during her apprenticeship at Michelin-starred Les Terrasses de Lyon at the Villa Florentine hotel. Everyone in the kitchen referred to her as “madame,” a sign of respect for her age but a dismissal of her place in the kitchen. “It’s definitely a boys club, and I knew I did not fit,” she said. At Les Terrasses, Ezgulian learned the ins-and-outs of haute cuisine. She also decided there that she would do things differently when she opened her own restaurant—the patriarchal hierarchies of the existing system were counterproductive to the creative work of cooking.

But discrimination continued even when she was in charge. When trying to hire male cooks, “there was one man who I interviewed and he kept asking me when he would get to meet the chef. I guess I did not fit his idea of a chef,” she said. Another male cook “quit one day right after the dinner service. He threw his apron on the floor and exclaimed, ‘I can’t work like this. You just don’t yell enough!’” Ultimately, Ezgulian decided she wanted to work alone. She simplified dishes so they required less labor and did away with heavy kitchen equipment like unwieldy oversized stockpots.

In her writing and media appearances today, Ezgulian gives women their due. While male chefs often nod to their mothers and grandmothers as the progenitors of their cuisine, they rarely give women’s domestic cookery credit for being foundational. Further erasures abound, particularly at the upper echelons. Currently, only one woman in France, Anne-Sophie Pic, heads a kitchen with three Michelin stars, and just two women, Andrée Rosier and Virginie Baselot, have ever been awarded the top accolade of Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Although more women than men enter culinary school, they are underrepresented in all areas of the culinary arts.

Ezgulian is working alongside Eugénie Brazier’s granddaughter, Jacotte Brazier, to promote women’s contributions to French cuisine. In 2007, Brazier started the nonprofit organization Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier, which grants scholarships to young women attending culinary school; Ezgulian also worked with Brazier to create a series of literary prizes to promote women’s food writing. Every year Les Amis holds a ceremony at the lavish Lyon town hall to honor annual scholarship and literary winners. For many of the young scholarship winners, it is the first time they have been validated publicly. Most importantly, Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier creates a much-needed support network for women in the culinary arts—the connections and opportunities to learn from people at the top of their field that can make or break a career.

Equality is possible in France’s kitchens. But first the nation must recognize that the professional and domestic settings are complementary. Sonia Ezgulian is not an outlier—but the exclusion she faced belongs in the past.

The post The Female Cooks Who Shaped French Cuisine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Forty-nine years to the day it was signed into law, a Zócalo/ASU Global Sport Institute event assembled to assess, “How Have Women’s Sports Changed Since Title IX?”

Sports reporter Lindsay Gibbs, who moderated the discussion, began by asking the panelists—a historian, a hall of fame athlete, and a sports lawyer—to get personal. How did this landmark legislation impact them?

“I was aware of it,” said World Golf Hall of Fame member Amy Alcott. She graduating high school two years after Title IX passed and recalled receiving only two college scholarship offers, one of which was to play on the men’s golf team.

Because of those limited options, she chose to go straight to the LPGA. She remembered watching a sea change among young players who joined the tour after her. “[They] had a wonderful opportunity to go to various colleges because Title IX came more into focus,” she said.

Sports attorney Jill Pilgrim, who has represented the LPGA and USA Track and Field, said she was not aware of Title IX when she graduated high school. Entering Princeton University in 1976, she recalled, the university “had no women’s track team, and no coach, no budget, no anything.”

Meanwhile, Arizona State University sports historian Victoria Jackson recalls living in “a Title IX bubble” when she attended high school in the late ’90s, a time bookended by the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics and a U.S.-hosted Women’s World Cup. “I was in the segregated suburbs of Chicago and a public school with lots of resources, and I was just living it up and living large. And only at college when I started studying these things did I realize what a bubble and what a unique moment in time that was,” she said.

After everyone spoke to the positives of Title IX, Gibbs brought up the law’s unintended consequences, such as fewer women coaches. Turning to Pilgrim, the sports lawyer, Gibbs asked: “Was there any way to design the system so that it didn’t happen—so that these inequities weren’t baked into Title IX?”

“I don’t think it would have been possible to write it into the federal law,” said Pilgrim. “I don’t think that America was that advanced at that time on gender issues.” The America that Title IX came into, and the country it is today, she said, remains “male-centric, male-dominated.”

How to solve that? “I don’t know that you can mandate the hiring” of women, she said, regarding the persistent gender gap in coaching. “You have to be very intentional if you want to change. That’s the same with racial issues, social justice issues: You have to recognize the problem, and then be willing to take the steps to change it.”

Jackson, the historian, added that it’s important to place Title IX in context, notably how the U.S. has a great deal of money tied to intercollegiate athletics. Even before Title IX came around, she pointed out, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were already more advanced in both sports development and gender equity than predominantly white institutions. She recalled that sprinter Wyomia Tyus used to call famed Tennessee State and Olympic track coach Ed Temple “Title XIII” “because they were coming up with ways to subsidize especially track and field athletes at HBCUs, to pay for college.”

Directing her next question to Alcott, Gibbs noted that golf was one of the rare women’s sports that already had a pro tour when Title IX was passed. “Did you see it have any impact on who you saw playing the game or who you saw coaching the game?”

Growing up, Alcott said that on TV she mostly saw men playing golf, despite the fact that the LPGA Tour began in the 1950s. But her father took her to watch pros like Althea Gibson and Kathy Whitworth before Alcott herself turned pro in 1975. She watched the sport grow global from there. Hisako “Chako” Higuchi, “one of the greatest players,” said Alcott, “came and opened the floodgates for golf to be popularized in Japan.” Today, she said, pointing to countries from Australia to Korea, “women’s golf teams are totally gals from all over the world.”

After recognizing the gains that have been made, Gibbs asked the panelists to address the unfinished business of Title IX. Why, for instance, is there still such a pay imbalance between the WNBA and the NBA?

“There are so many contributors to why Title IX hasn’t catapulted women’s sports at the professional level,” said Pilgrim. “Let me start by saying Title IX was awesome in expanding the number of female student-athletes,” she said. But “society is structured in America and in many other countries, whereby the opportunities for women as coaches or professional athletes are limited.”

Jackson expressed her hope that these opportunities will continue to widen from observing her own students, who “see sport in a totally different way.”

“There is so much excitement and energy around women’s team sports,” she said. “As far as professional athletes coming together and working together on shared goals, the WNBA just exemplifies that.” When the police shooting of Jacob S. Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, brought the sports world to a halt in protest last year, for example, the WNBA was the first league to come forward with a collective, unified position. “The immediacy and the rapidness in which the WNBA and its team leaders came together to have a unified voice” spoke volumes, Jackson argued, which is why there’s more corporate investment happening in women’s professional team sports now. “They are so good and on point on this—and have been for decades,” she added. “It’s just that it’s in the spotlight more right now, so I am optimistic about the energy and excitement of young people around women’s sports going forward for sure.”

The panel also answered questions from the audience, who participated via a live YouTube chatroom, including one about whether other countries have enacted similar legislation to Title IX in the past few decades.

Jackson fielded that question, and said that the closest example would be American universities that set up in other countries and influence intercollegiate sports leagues.

Take New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus, led by athletic director Peter Dicce, she said. They have “created a culture of gender equity and intercollegiate athletics, not just at NYU Abu Dhabi, but for all of the colleges that compete in the intercollegiate league in Abu Dhabi.” It’s a great example, said Jackson, of how we can “take our energies around gender equity with us, and influence other places who then make it their own, too.”

The post What Women Athletes Won When Title IX Became Law appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what exactly is feminist foreign policy, and how does it work? That’s a question New York Times reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta found herself pausing on when she wrote about feminist foreign policy last summer—and one she posed to panelists at last night’s Zócalo/Scripps College event, “What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?”

“The more we talk about this, and the more we open up the discussion, the more people will understand what it means,” said Haridasani Gupta, who served as moderator for the online discussion, and writes the Times’ gender newsletter, “In Her Words.”

The best way to start, said Melanne Verveer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, is by considering what foreign policy does: “It advances the interest of our country, of our citizens; it advances democracy, human rights, international understanding; it’s about preventing conflicts and it’s about creating good relations with other nations.”

Recognizing that women make up half the world’s population, Verveer continued, feminist foreign policy puts “a gender lens or a gender perspective” on everything the State Department deals with, from economics to human rights issues—a lens that is necessary for meaningful diplomacy. “Women experience most circumstances differently and we have to factor in those differences if we’re going to have more effective foreign policy,” she said.

For Scripps College political economist Nancy Neiman, who studies global markets, her definition is less tied to traditional foreign policy goals. “I would move focus away from the interests of the nation, which is historically what foreign policy is about,” said Neiman, “and think about transnational issues—that the vulnerability of women in global markets is really a transnational issue, and it’s an intersectional issue; it’s about race, class and gender. I think those are the things that have to stay on the table, and the hope would be that more and more countries are interested in actually addressing these important issues.”

Diana Alarcón González, chief advisor and foreign affairs coordinator for Mexico City, meanwhile, considered it from the perspective of her own constituency of 9.2 million people, of which 52.8 percent are women. “Advocating for equal rights and defining our public policies around the issues of rights means making sure that more than 50 percent of people in our city have equal access to rights,” she said.

New America Foundation fellow Elmira Bayrasli spoke last—and welcomed the differing definitions that came before hers. “It isn’t just one thing,” she agreed.

Bayrasli, who is also co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative that aims to increase the number of female voices in foreign policy, said she frames feminist foreign policy around “stability and progress.” While she’s met many people in Washington who have dismissed it “as a very kind of niche, a very cute little side issue that feminists like myself like to embrace,” she argued that feminist foreign policy speaks to the challenges of the world today, and how countries have to think beyond their own borders. “Now there are numerous global challenges that really require us to look at the outcomes, which are stability and progress, and fundamentally to me feminist foreign policy is about getting to that,” she said.

Looking at such outcomes, Haridasani Gupta asked the panelists for examples that show how a feminist lens can lead to progressive change on the world stage.

Verveer cited the role of women in the negotiations leading to Colombia’s peace agreement in 2016 after 50 years of civil war. “The women had put out proposal after proposal. Finally [they] gathered, in exasperation, in a summit, and came up with a bunch of recommendations at a time where there was a real serious effort to finally do this,” she said. Because of this, the issues that affected women throughout the conflict were considered, and there were recommendations in place in the peace agreement to address them. “For the first time ever,” Verveer added, “there was a gender subcommission that was part and parcel of the peace talks.”

On the flip side, the North American Free Trade Agreement offers a sobering example of what happens when feminist foreign policy isn’t considered, said Neiman, the professor of politics. “The story of Juárez is just a tragedy,” she said, referring to how the expansion of the maquila industry due to the 1994 trade pact led to a wave of migrants, particularly “young, Indigenous women, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” to work in the expanding assembly plants in Juárez, where the homicide rate for women would increase by 600 percent between NAFTA’s passage and 2001. “We end up with a large number of disappeared and murdered women that is interconnected with the devaluation of young women’s lives,” said Neiman. All of this, she said, came out of a foreign trade policy that didn’t keep women’s interests in mind.

Audience members from the YouTube chatroom also contributed to the conversation. One asked what holds the U.S. State Department back from joining the countries that have already formally announced feminist foreign policies: “Is it just fear of the word?”

“Certainly, the word has something to do with it,” Verveer answered. Feminism has “been over time a loaded word in the United States, and detractors have tried to put all kinds of interpretations on it. But I don’t want to say we don’t have a feminist foreign policy. I think that’s a misapprehension.”

The U.S. may not be up there with Sweden, which first coined the term, she said, but it has made “vast efforts” to integrate issues that impact women into its foreign policy since the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing in 1995.

In Canada, Haridasani Gupta noted, every budget now goes through gender analysis. Did the panelists have any concrete examples of ways governments can commit to feminist foreign policy?

In Mexico City, González offered, officials are ensuring women are at the policy table. “The chief of government, our mayor, just returned a proposal” from a technical committee, she said, because the group had only “two women [among] ten men at the table, and for her, it was not acceptable.”

There is much more feminist foreign policy can do for the world, the panelists agreed.

“Women always have to prove something is going to work when meanwhile there’s abundant evidence of things that aren’t working” in today’s world, Bayrasli said: democracy declining, strongmen on the rise, tensions simmering, and a pandemic killing millions. “Clearly there needs to be a reassessment to how we’re approaching foreign policy now.”

Feminist foreign policy could be a possible solution to the challenges of today, because, she said, it offers “a modern lens to the modern world.”

The post Feminist Foreign Policy Can Offer a ‘Modern Lens to a Modern World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lowe has exhibited videos, performances, and installations throughout the United States and created the independent art and design imprint Trial and Error during the pandemic. She comes from a long line of Black makers (musicians, fashion designers, farm laborers) and has left two coveted art positions after being targeted by what she names as pervasive racism. She spoke with editor-at-large Minal Hajratwala via Zoom about her work, her family’s artistic legacy, and why “Ropes, Pinks” is an act of self-portraiture.

I’m curious about the origin story of this work, “Ropes, Pinks,” as an installation that also has an improvisation quality to it, since it changes each time you hang it. How did it come about?

It emerged from the same energy as my abstract painting, and it has a relationship to performance and theater, which is a big part of my background. I was at a residency where I was determined to write this essay about my experience at Evergreen State College, trying to reckon with having been silenced. I was dealing with anxiety, frustration, sadness, and the fear that if I put anything out publicly I would become a target again.

It struck me how much I felt like I had to be so logical and so perfect and do that thing as a Black woman where, in order for someone to hear you, you have to do all these mental backflips. The color was a way for me to express what was also going on, which was me screaming and crying. I was imagining being inside a color. Pink was this central theme that kept coming up, and I thought, how is anybody going to take this seriously—this crinkly, sloppy pinkness?

At that residency, my father came and visited, because we’re working on some music projects together. I had this whole convoluted explanation for the paintings, and he looked at me and was like, “I think you just got to do it. Whatever this is, commit to it and try.”

One of the things that I’ve learned from him as a jazz musician is that it’s important to focus on bringing the tools that you have to the improvisational moment with as much commitment as you can. Ultimately I decided that improvisation was going to be part of the conceit of the work, that it would actually change each time, within a set of parameters: that it would hang, that it would swing, that it would seem like it was sort of pulling and pushing, that it would move in more than one direction.

A dear friend and artist, Aisha Harrison, suggested this exercise where you personify a piece of work and have a conversation with it and ask it what it means. Through that I started to embrace the explicit kind of association with lynching, and of pink with gender and queerness, even though that wasn’t where I was originally coming from, and also embrace the way that it can be lots of different sort of elements at once.

I imagine it coiled up like a snake in your studio, and I noticed that you often install it in conjunction with video. What has surprised you through the different installations? Does this “body” continue to communicate with you?

I am consistently surprised by the various ways that I can create a sense of literal tension in the ropes without adding in other elements. It speaks to the relationship between vulnerability and strength. One way I think about this work is that it’s like the insides of a body: It’s like intestines, it’s like viscera.

It can exist on its own but also as part of a larger narrative. The video that is most often installed nearby is this autobiographical meditation on the origins of my name, which is this very small, intimate thing: water, flowers, hand, Black music, and obviously, the pink. When I’ve held open studios, people had such an intense physical reaction to how pink my studio was. For some it was a magnetic draw, and for some it would be almost a physical revulsion, like “gross,” and they would walk right out.

What I’ve been going toward is this idea that pink is the inverse of black, or kind of the flip side—it’s part of it. Black people in this country have so much deep sensitivity. We know this: People who have been harmed, people who have experienced trauma are very sensitive. And various kinds of reactivity or frustration or capacities for beauty and creativity are functions of sensitivity.

The expectation that we be calm and erudite and quote-unquote civilized—those expectations are about other people’s fears. If you actually grappled with how awful it is to have treated people like property for so long, you’d have to deal with all of this anger and pain and sadness and frustration and confusion. And so instead, you try to tamp it down—from everybody, and in particular from Black folks.

Pink is an expression of that sensitivity, the power of that, and how scary it is. These guts are just always showing, just out and exposed to the world. How painful that is, that level of being exposed and sensitive. And how powerful it can be—to consistently be like a lightning rod.

I’m moved by the ways that you speak about your relationship with your father in your art, both in the video about your name and in the film about his experience as a journalist in 1967, being beaten by police while covering a protest in New Jersey. It’s amazing for a queer artist to have such a direct lineage that you can draw on. I wonder what you want to say about that?

I feel extremely lucky to have been raised by artists and around artists. I have as many hang-ups and anxieties and imposter syndrome as any artist, but there was never a point when I had to be convinced that this was a valid occupation and work. It was something that families, Black families, working class families, did. My father is an artist, but so was his mother, so was his father, and his grandfather. Art and teaching and ministry and community work all wove together as part of that lineage. My mother sews and designs clothing and quilts. My dad’s first wife, who I’m close with, is a poet. It is not unusual for me to call someone in my family for support and inspiration because they’re people who both know me but also know the creative questions that I’m trying to ask and the lineages that I swim in. They know the oppression and the violence and have a lot of experience of creating as an absolutely critical element of survival.

I have purposely designed projects to learn along with them. In this country, we were commodities. So we’re always going to be playing around with—and having a tension around—the way that our utterances are commodified. It’s always been a survival strategy on really practical levels, like, this is stuff we can do in order to make money.

But also it gave people opportunities to nourish themselves, to communicate with one another, to create opportunities for freedom making. Being able to dig into that has been such a blessing, including the parts of it that are just purely nerdy. One of my favorite things is when those groups of artists get together somewhat outside of, like, a white gaze, when we’re actually looking toward each other instead of outward, and get to just nerd out about music theory or film theory and the realities of how that touches our other experiences historically, culturally, whatever comes into play. We get to play. That is an incredible thing to have as a groundwork for how I was just brought into this world. My parents connected early on, through music, and I was named after [the John Coltrane] song for a reason.

A lot of the pink is also dedicated to him, because he’s actually spent an enormous amount of his life developing and creating a sort of sensitivity and nurturance in him that the world does its best to beat out of an adult Black man.

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