September 18, 2014
On Friday, September 12, the Womyn’s Center brought Danielle Roper ’06 to the Hill to speak about her personal experience with feminism. Roper— sharp, funny and fiercely passionate— spoke with students about intersectionality, misconceptions of the modern feminist movement, and her personal connection to third world feminism.
Roper continually expressed the importance of understanding the matrix of oppression in which people live. She, being Jamaican, a feminist, a woman and a lesbian, had to actively work to overcome these overlapping levels of disadvantage. She touched upon many things that made this exceptionally difficult for her to do, including the notion that only white women could be associated with the feminist movement, homophobia (both at Hamilton and in her home country) and resistance from her father, a preacher.
“Feminism gave me the language through which I could interpret myself,” Roper explained.
Upon arriving at Hamilton she began to take Women’s Studies courses and actively participate in the Womyn’s Center here at Hamilton, a group that meets regularly to discuss gender and sexuality, and plans multiple events throughout the academic year.
“I realized that there were forms of feminism I love and forms of feminism that I just can’t subscribe to. A kind of feminism that does not factor in race is a kind of feminism that I cannot agree with.”
After extensively studying systems of privilege and the intersection of various feminist movements, Roper began to definitively identify herself as a third-world feminist. Also known as “postcolonial feminism,” this sort of movement seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world.
Roper was also seriously concerned with the modern feminist movement, a movement that she described as full of contradiction. To illustrate her point, she showed the music video for Beyonce’s popular song “Flawless.” Beyonce does mean for the words and images in the video to empower women. This intention is made explicitly clear by her inclusion of a segment from a well-known feminist Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Yet there are some seriously questionable parts too: namely, her use of the term “bitches,” her perfectly calculated appearance and sexual references to Monica Lewinsky.
While these things are misrepresentative of the goals of many radical modern-day feminists, Roper also conceded that feminism cannot continue to operate in the black and white terms it has been. If we polarize feminism too much, it becomes inaccessible and nearly unachievable. Rather, she says that she “aspires to a cross-cultural dialogue between hip-hop feminism and third world feminism,” one that allows for a reconciliation of these contradictions via inter-group communication and the sharing of ideas and solutions to the problems of the oppressed that plague modern society.
Finally, as Roper neared the end of her talk, she put specific emphasis on the matter of conceiving of feminism in local terms rather than in societal terms. She wanted to make it clear that when people speak of tangibles rather than of lofty concepts, understanding and agreement come readily, and the flow of conversation focuses on concrete example rather than memorized terms and events. “Lived experiences are far more important than quotes or academic texts or ten thousand articles,” she said. “Civil discourse is important.”
As her lecture began to wind down, Roper welcomed questions and thoughts on any of the topics covered. Students freely voiced their personal thoughts and opinions, often drawing on knowledge from prior class discussions and occurrences in their personal lives.
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