Faculty Panel Examines Feminism, Multiculturalism

A year after holding its first successful feminism-centered event, Students for Choice teamed up with fellow student groups and once again invited professors and administrators to discuss their views on feminism with students on Wednesday night in the Ella Weed Room of Milbank Hall. This year’s discussion focused on how feminism and multiculturalism interact.

“We saw these issues, and we wanted to be part of this bigger conversation on campus about multiculturalism and bringing diverse people together to talk about issues like this,” said event organizer Shira Gordon, BC ’08. Gordon is a board member of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which, along with Dimensions and Productive Outreach for Women, co-hosted “Feminism and Multiculturalism: A Teach-In” with Students for Choice.

After the success of its first event a year ago, Students for Choice said it was determined to begin a tradition of annual events examining feminism’s relevance to today’s world. This year, it elected to explore the topic in terms of its relationship to multiculturalism—how they affect each other, why they are related, and why they are different. The choice, leaders said, was based largely on the controversy and increased interest about multiculturalism that surrounded such fall events as the hunger strike and the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Panel members included Anne Lapidus Lerner, the director and founder of the Jewish Women’s Studies Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Claudio Lomnitz, the director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and Neferti Tadiar, the acting director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

“I think that multiculturalism and feminism have a long road to go together,” Lerner said. “They’re clearly not exactly the same and they’re not interchangeable, but I think that because each of them brings what was previously structurally on the margin or hierarchically subordinate ... they can make a very strong alliance for looking at a lot of issues, and I hope that they will be able to continue to inform each other because I think that it will ultimately lead to a much richer discourse.”

Self-described feminist Emma Lowrey, BC ’10, said that she found the event to be refreshingly positive.

“There are so many debates over feminism where people are ... negative,” she said. “There should be a balanced perspective of the issues.”

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