GENDER ISSUES IN PEACEBUILDING - THE SILENCE IN THE CLASSROOMS

Marian Chatfiled-Taylor

    The name of our newsletter, Footpaths, makes me think about how practical and down to earth grassroots peacemaking needs to be. At the same time, I know that peace makers are motivated by strong, big visions of a future free of violence and war.

   Being grounded means staying patient and alert. No easy assignment in a world full of suffering and injustice. And yet, being grounded offers pleasures and rewards, not the least of which is staying alert to and aware of one's own environment---including the environment inside yourself. Being grounded implies wholeness and a capacity to breathe---to take in and let go of what we need in our relationship to what we call Spirit or God, and to each other. I find it hard to express such thoughts, because inevitably language forces me to make concrete and particular so much that feels mysterious and inexpressible.

   This said, I feel sad, angry, and bewildered by how often we examine issues of peace, violence and social change, without addressing issues of patriarchy and gender. In most of the classes I've participated in at EMU, gender doesn't even turn up as a legitimate topic. Ignoring or suppressing issues of gender has caused me, and many women students I have spoken with, difficulty and pain.

   We come to our work as if we were eunuchs. We talk about people, as if we know how it feels to be human without being female and male people. I am not arguing for a particular ideology, though I proudly identify myself a feminist, but I am arguing for the necessity for raising gender questions. How can we talk about the role of peace-makers as if being female or male didn't shape our experiences? Would we enter discussions of peacemaking, and fail to recognize issues of culture, class, ethnicity and religion? Our reading lists appear hopelessly blank on the topic of gender. Class agendas present gaping holes where issues of gender ought to arise. In class discussions we barely identify the need to examine the roles of women and men as peacemakers and/or as agents of violence. It is as if we hypothesize a world where power differences between women and men do not exist: where the socialization of boys and girls is identical.

   To get specific about social change, about turning cultures of violence into cultures of peace, we need to ground ourselves in the realities of how, where and when violence occurs. We need to look at the spectrum of violence in society, from individual male violence against, the socialization of boys and girls, and power differences between women and men. We need to look at so-called normal relations between women and men, since it is in these roles that our worst troubles occur. We need to ask: Who benefits from sexist traditions that shatter women's lives and make a mockery of women's freedom. How do men learn and practice violence? We need to share personal truths, not to humiliate each other and certainly not to increase the tensions between us, but to get to know one another in a spirit of truth-telling, to assess and to work on changing the conditions of our shared responsibilities. We need, in our academic work, to do the very peace-making, reconciliation, forgiveness, and relationship building between women and men that we talk about doing as peace-makers at other levels of experience. We need to close the gaps between our visions of peace and our methods of studying peace-making. We can't create a culture of peace if our culture of peace-building remains patriarchal.

   In several of my classes at EMU, when the issue of gender was raised, people cracked jokes, as if mockery and sarcasm could shatter the realities of patriarchy or the dream of women's liberation. Occasionally, a male student has felt empowered to deliver an impromptu sermon about how women ought to stay home and raise children because this is supposedly what the Bible tells us. Rarely do such pronouncements become the occasion for serious classroom discussion. Instead, I have seen professors ignore these remarks, as if we couldn't possibly allow space and time for students to take up gender conflict. But we live in a multicultural world; we constitute a multicultural student body. When a student or a teacher talks about the role of women in what feels to any one of us to be degrading, insulting, or biased terms, we need---as a group---to address our thoughts and feelings. Are we afraid to bring up issues of gender because they might provoke real conflicts? Are we not a program designed to enable people to work with social divisions in ways that are non-violent and creative?

   Our goal, I believe, is to enable people to shape and tell their stories, to support conditions in which each person's and group's story counts. This requires us to remove those cultural institutions that stifle and suppress memory and narrative through subtle and overt forms of privilege and abusive power. Patriarchy is one key mechanism that promotes the suppression and silencing of women's stories. We who are feminists are trying to dismantle this system of suppression, as if we were deconstructing a mansion brick by brick. Such work requires relentless but joyful commitments to nurture and celebrate the long-silenced voices of women. I wish that those of us called peace-makers can be about this work together, as women and men, old and young. Our dreams require us to develop bonds of trust that can replace generations of hostility and ignorance.

   It's late in the day for students of peace-making to take up the issues of sexism, patriarchy and gender---but it certainly isn't too late. We need to develop the courses, the reading lists, the discussion groups, and the political will to face this challenge; and I think we need to do it (if not yesterday) at least now.

Marian Chatfield Taylor is an MA student currently living in San Francisco, and working for the American Friends Service Committee. She's attended SPI every year since 1996!