Hugo Schwyzer

I’m at home, just after 2:00PM California time. We got up at 4:00 this morning, Massachusetts time — 1:00AM West Coast Time — to get to the airport and get on our plane from Boston to Southern California. I’m home, haven’t even thought about unpacking, and in need of both exercise and a shower (in that order).

It’s Cesar Chavez Day, a state holiday observed by some, not all public institutions across California. Pasadena City College wisely is among those that do observe the occasion, so I get to be at home to process through my tiredness rather than at work. And though I have a lot to blog about later this week and next, I wanted to write some closing thoughts on the Women, Action, and Media conference I attended this past weekend on the MIT campus. My summaries on specific events are in my two previous posts.

This was my first WAM conference, and of course, I came eager to meet and network with other feminists, particularly those whom I already “knew” through the blogosphere. I did get to meet a lot of bloggers and activists whose work I admire, particularly at the WAM party on Saturday night. Networking really does happen, and I am especially grateful to those who sought me out for the purpose of introducing me to others. So much of the blogging aspect of new media feminism is essentially solitary, so to get a chance to meet folks “in the flesh” whose online work was so familiar to me was really a delight.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there were — not surprisingly — very few men at the WAM 2008 conference. I’ve been going to conferences and participating in the gender studies world for over two decades, so being in a minority based upon my gender is not a new experience for me. What was new, and initially disconcerting, was feeling, well, so much older than everyone else. The number of feminist bloggers over 40 is a good deal smaller than the number of feminist bloggers under that (admittedly arbitrary) demarcation line. If there were other male academics at WAM in my age bracket, I didn’t get a chance to meet any; the few other men with whom I chatted (more about one such chat in my next post) were all under 30. I did meet up with a number of women journalists, academics, and bloggers closer to my age range, but most of those chats included an almost obligatory, humorous reference to the “age gap” between ourselves and the majority of WAMmers.

One thing I noticed this weekend was the continuation of a trend I began to see about a decade or so ago: a growing willingness to welcome male feminists as wanted allies in the fight for gender justice. Twenty years ago, when I was an undergrad and going to my first women’s studies conferences, there was less receptivity to men’s role in the movement than there seems to be today. To overgeneralize, “Second Wave” feminists (those whose defining decade was the Sixties) tended to be more suspicious in the past about the possibility that a man could really be a feminist than do Third and Post-Wavers (some of whom are young enough to be my children) today. Many women born in the baby boom, of course, had a harder time accepting male feminists because they had so few examples in their own families (and in the broader culture) of men who both professed and lived out radically non-sexist, egalitarian principles. A generation of women born in the 1970s and ’80s has grown up far more familiar with flesh-and-blood examples of men who are committed to gender justice. More and more, just within the past few years, I hear from my students and from others (including one high school sophomore I met at WAM) of growing up with “feminist Dads.” Not a lot of women came of age with feminist fathers four and five decades ago!

I notice too, that I get fewer and fewer challenges to my role as a man teaching women’s studies. Certainly, I get questioned still about my motives and my qualifications, but less and less often. Indeed, the criticisms that come my way these days — compared to those when I first started teaching women’s studies in the mid-’90s — have more to do with “whiteness” and perceptions of class privilege than with maleness. That’s a notable shift.

I notice too that there’s far less insistence on the use of the phrase “pro-feminism” to describe men’s support for feminist ideals; the notion that men ought to call themselves “pro-feminists” rather than just plain feminists has become increasingly less popular, particularly with younger activists. The argument over whether a man can “ever really be a feminist” isn’t entirely over, but it’s a discussion that seems increasingly irrelevant to a younger generation. I suppose that’s a good thing, and it’s one of the reasons why — as long-time readers will know — that I have increasingly described my ideological commitments without the “pro” prefix.

I learned a great deal from the folks I met and listened to. And really, I did mostly listen. I’m hungry to take back much of what I heard this past weekend (about moving from “reproductive rights” to “reproductive justice”, or about new ways of writing and thinking about sex work) to my students. I’m inspired by the connections I made, happy about the little collection of business cards fattening my wallet, eager to rededicate myself to doing this vital work I feel called to do.

I’ve got a few posts percolating in my head, and though this week looks frantically busy, I’m confident I can bang out a few pieces in the days to come.