Being a Feminist Student in Academia

By Diana Barrera @WomenTalk_Back This article is adapted from Diana’s talk at the Feminist Fight Back: Moving Beyond the Gender Wars in Academia session at #FiLiA2021

It only took me being part of the leadership of the feminist society Women Talk Back! to go from experiencing regular bureaucracy to increasing levels of woman-hating policies. Women Talk Back! has been trying to establish a dialogue with Bristol Students’ Union since 2018 so that female students and women from the community can benefit from consciousness-raising and other public events. Every step of the way there seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm for collaboration on the part of the institutions.

Although the use of the single-sex exemption, as allowed through the Equality Act 2010, has been explained since Women Talk Back! was founded. We have repeatedly had to justify the reasoning for our need to be women-only. Even our public events were affected by this institutional misogyny. For example, we were asked to cover the costs of external security as a preventive measure for students’ protests. The students protesters included those who have tried to have our events cancelled. Matters have escalated to the point that Women Talk Back! is pursuing a legal case against the Bristol Students’ Union.

My experience of being a feminist student in academia has been a constant struggle with institutional misogyny. What happened with Women Talk Back!, including the Bristol Student Unions (BSU)’s approval of a spurious definition of “women” in its bylaws, has been an eye-opener. If I ever thought that universities enabled spaces for intellectual exploration, democratic debate, improvement of the selves and our communities through rigorous scientific scrutiny that is guided by a down-to-earth ethical code of conduct, I must have been deluded by my wishful thinking.

The worst part is that the students’ unions are supposed to be like our guardians, somewhere we could go to in case we encountered any difficulty in our student life. Yet the Bristol Students’ Union has failed to do so for Women Talk Back!. And sadly, this is not an isolated incident in academic settings in the UK, thus feeding further into the silencing of much needed critical voices, both students’ and professors’.  

The ongoing silencing, cancelling, and threatening around the sex-gender topic makes it even more difficult for women who are in the frontline to successfully reach vulnerable women and girls in need of critical and emergency services by muddling the definition of the very subject of it all. A bigger danger lies in the perception that individually we have to fight all the fronts, so I have found that there are divides as a result of minimising the effort of one another, individually and collectively. There is the notion that the academic debates are useless, or that it is unimportant who gets to keep the word ‘woman’, while femicide and rape numbers are soaring through the roof. I perceive that mostly these criticisms come from the urge to prioritise attending women and girls at immediate risk.

The way I see it, all of these efforts add up to the bigger picture. It is paramount that we all do what we can to tackle misogyny and male violence against women and girls, both by responding to the surging calls, and also devising ways to prevent it. For example, Women Talk Back! has organised Consciousness-Raising meetings, and public events as those were the activities that we could do at the time; now Women Talk Back! is standing up for our right to keep legal protections of women and girls, because this is the call that can be addressed right now.

The sisters who are defending language and those who are firefighting are key players in turning the tide. No matter how small we think our scope could be, we need the sister who invites us to feminist conferences like FiLiA, and the one who listen, and the one who inspires through her being untamed, we need you all! I encourage everyone to be an active part of this, whether it is through grassroots organisations, activism, academic pursuits, art, or other avenues. Now more than ever we need to coordinate action, communicate, inspire, walk together, take part in debates, question, bring our critical thinking and follow our intuition. It is only by working together that we can win.

Finally, I leave you a few questions to keep on reflecting:

Why do some groups receive more support than others from institutions?

What is the purpose of having laws that cannot be used?

Who decides what rights women can have?