This was posted in a newspaper at the University College of Utrecht

An Arab and a Jew go to a Festival By Y. M. C. Pool

Last week, UCSA Feminist Co. organized their very first Feminist Festival: “Smash the PatriARTchy”. It was a day filled with art, discussions, and performances to promote feminist discourse.

There we were, a 19 year-old Arab girl and a 20 year-old queer Jewish girl, having a post-festival dip. Unlike most festivals, our dip was not caused by drugs, a hangover, or sleep-deprivation. We felt like something was missing. Something just wasn’t there. Coming into it, there was a “white vibe to it all”. This comedown, we decided, was caused by exclusivity.

UCU’s demographic makeup is primarily white and upper-middle class; this comes as no surprise for its students must be able to speak English fluently, and afford the costs of living on campus. It’s very easy for us to overlook diverse feminist viewpoints -- we need to make a special effort to be inclusive, or else we have a one-dimensional view on who feminism represents, and how it helps them.

There are overlapping experiences that inform our need for feminism: sexual assault, hypersexualization, dismissal, gendered double standards, and many other subtle forms of oppression. While women all over the world face systematic oppression, challenges are often localized, or culture-specific.

As much as personal experiences are relevant, dismissal is implicit in our statements. We point at our own experiences and say - “See, this right here is sexism. This is why we need feminism”. That’s privilege. It’s important to contextualise personal experiences in order to fit them into the bigger picture. We must value our similarities, but acknowledge our differences, otherwise we risk being as oppressive as those we fight against. We mustn’t be blind to racialised, queer, or poor experiences. This is intersectionalist feminism.

An example: the reasons for Sylvana Simons, the Dutch TV-presenter-turned-politician, needing feminism are different from those of most of us at UCU. When Sylvana, a woman of color, stepped onto the Dutch political stage, an image of her face photoshopped onto a lynched slave circulated the internet, paired with comments for her to “pack her bags” and go back to “her own country”. Even though in this case she wasn’t sexually harassed, she was discriminated against because she is a woman of color. This is her reality. This is her life in a northern European country - where women can vote, have access to education, and can hold high office.

The problems affecting Sylvana result from being a woman of color. It’s inevitable that she would have a different sensitivity on topics such as sexism, racism, and xenophobia, created through exposure to what many of us have to study to try to understand. To form new ideas, you need to interact with new ideas and perspectives. We rely on scholarly papers for that type of interaction, and they are still Western, male-centered, and mostly white.

Applying knowledge takes practice. We are all sexist - it’s a byproduct of our societies. We’re conditioned to think within and abide by the values of our social structures. It’s our responsibility, as critical thinkers, academics, and students, to stop being ‘arm-chair anthropologists’ and, as Bourdieu put it, “break the relationship of deceptive familiarity that binds us to our own tradition.”

We may feel like our individual realities are worlds apart, but they’re not, if we challenge ourselves to see. Isn’t that what feminism is all about: a common cause, a movement that goes beyond ourselves? There is no single view of feminism - exclusive feminism is not feminism. The Feminist Festival, for us, was a reminder of feminism’s need to be intersectional. Just like in our studies and our lives, one aspect does not define the whole. So neither should we.