“What does gender mean at Conn?” A few weeks ago you might have gotten a postcard in your mailbox asking you this question. If you didn’t stop to respond, think about it now: What does gender mean at Conn? At a former women’s college with a brand new Women’s Center, the matter of gender and its implications in our everyday lives goes surprisingly unnoticed. Perhaps we should note the significance of its (often literal) absence.
This month, the Women’s Center opened the theme for the year, “What does gender mean at Conn?” with an art installation. The postcards prompted students to write, draw or collage on the blank side to express their thoughts and experiences in response to this question. These decorated postcards were attached to a cloth banner hung in Cro as a space for the Connecticut College community to engage in a discussion about the different ways gender is experienced on our campus. The project was put together by students from the Women’s Center, excited to have an open-ended and creative project to offer the college community.
And yet, the morning after the banner had been installed we discovered it stolen. What was intended to be an art installation unintentionally became performance art: these misogynistic vandals and thieves summarily demonstrated the silencing and hostility to which women are subject on this campus.
Last year, shortly after the uproar of Lobstergate and the far-reaching discussions of race and class that it prompted, (was gender even mentioned? did we note the elitist male implications of the stunt?) another event occurred that received no recognition. A group of male students were witnessed tearing down a cloth banner advertising last year’s Take Back the Night march, a banner that simply read “Take a stand against sexual violence!”
The group tore it so forcefully that it shred the material; was it so deeply objectionable for women on this campus to publicly stake claim to their own personal safety that it needed to be silenced?
Moreover, when this incident was taken to the administration there was weak debate as to whether this act constituted a “bias incident” on the basis of gender. Ultimately, it was shelved in the safely uncontroversial category of “vandalism.”
Despite decades of international human rights work recognizing sexual violence as a gender-based crime, it seems the administration has decided that these international standards do not apply at Connecticut College. By this reasoning, an antagonistic response to the biggest movement against sexual violence at our school did not fall under the category of gender bias. In the blink of an eye, the aggressive gendered aspect of the act disappeared. This incident’s implications of harm and violence towards women were simply dismissed.
So what do we say on a campus where the implications of gender go unremarked? Where asking the community to notice the way gender works in the world around us is in itself so controversial that it cannot be tolerated? Where publicly decrying sexual violence is met with hostility? Where threats to women’s safety are kept quiet, disempowering women to protect themselves? Where (in the very prominent College Voice article, “Safety Concerns on Campus”) one administrator treats the harm that comes to women on our college campus as a “not terribly unusual” occurrence, that violence against women is an unfortunate “tendency” at “colleges with lots of women?” That “it happens” and is therefore insignificant?
In so many ways we have grown complacent, and things that should inspire outrage in us we treat as simply unremarkable. So when it is asked what gender means at Conn, why should we let the matter quietly disappear? It is imperative that we, as individuals and as a community, stand up for our beliefs and ensure the safety and empowerment of the unacknowledged. Do you understand that it is some of those on this campus – your classmates, your roommates, your neighbors – who are targeted while others among us perpetuate the hostility?
Will you think about gender now?
– Angelica Sgouros, Elizabeth Holland, Danielle Murphy, Matthew Mitchell, Samantha Herndon, Cristina Moreno, Susan Reed, Emily Wilcox, Colleen MacPhee, Matthew Burns
Thank you for writing this, guys. I knew nothing of these events, and it sounds like the blatant indifference shown on the part of the administration and greater college community has gotten worse since I graduated. You are all informed and active people, and you think much more about this question than I do, but I’m curious: what is the most effective way to address these problems? Perhaps meeting one-on-one with pertinent members of the administration, so they remember the uniqueness and imperative of these issues? Lots of student groups hang banners, multiple groups stage marches, so perhaps an important path toward a better campus is something that is not done by other groups. You surely have better ideas than I do. What can be done?
It makes logical sense to me, though, that a campus with a higher percentage of women would have a higher percentage of crimes against women, for the simple reason that there are more of them. But then again, one might think that a more women-heavy ratio would cause gender-based violence to be stifled by peer pressure. Apparently that is not the case.
So I ask you informed, action-oriented friends once more: what can we do, and what can we do today?
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