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“Dear Susan Muaddi Darraj,
My name is Reem Hassan,
and I am a first-year un-
dergraduate student at the
University of Michigan-Ann
Arbor. I identify as a Mus-
lim
Palestinian
American
woman, and I am currently
studying on a pre-law track
with hopes of majoring in
public policy and minoring
in Arab and Muslim Ameri-
can Studies. I was first intro-
duced to your piece “It’s Not
an Oxymoron” during my
first semester in university,
where I took an introduc-
tory course to women’s and
gender studies (WGS). To
say the least, I found myself
absolutely astounded by your
work. Having registered for
the course on a whim and
expecting to only mildly re-
late to the material, I was
shocked to be so completely
moved by our first reading. I
Intersectional
feminism
is real and alive
REEM HASSAN
MiC Columnist
explicitly remember feeling
as though you had taken my
thoughts on the intersection
of my Arab identity on my
feminist experience straight
out of my head and put it on
paper. I felt heard. Your short
piece had the ability to influ-
ence my work for the rest of
that semester and inspired
me to take my understanding
to new and deeper levels and
enroll in our Arab American
Feminists course this semes-
ter. Upon interacting with
your piece yet again this se-
mester, I was reminded of
why it had such an impact on
me, and how deeply I reso-
nate with your story.”
This is an excerpt taken
from one of the first “Femi-
nist Love Letters” I wrote
last semester while taking
an Arab American Feminists
course with Professor Char-
lotte Karem Albrecht — an
absolute icon in the WGS de-
partment. We were asked to
address a “love letter” to one
of the authors we had read in
class, both celebrating and
critiquing their work. I was
immediately drawn to write
to Susan Muaddi Darraj, who
authored “It’s Not an Oxy-
moron: The Search for an
Arab Feminism.”
****
Although I have always con-
sidered my feminist awak-
ening as something deeply
personal, I have come to
learn that many other Arab
American women empower
themselves in a similar ex-
perience. It is an experi-
ence where we constantly
question the grounds upon
which we are allowed to call
ourselves feminists, where
we never feel as though we
are allowed to call ourselves
such a phrase because of
western impositions onto the
definition of feminism, and
where we live an experience
that we never feel like we
have the right to articulate.
In all truth, “Middle East-
ern” (in quotations because
the phrase is a colonial in-
vention that I am not exactly
fond of ) or Arab women are
not exactly regarded as the
token feminist figures in the
western lens. We are forced
to carry a stereotyped repu-
tation of arranged marriages,
housework, oppression, be-
ing forced to cover up and
countless other baseless tags
and labels. And beyond this,
even after I have finally come
to understand what femi-
nism really entailed, it was
something that was treated
with so much animosity by
the people around me. In
high school, boys amped up
their “women belong in the
kitchen” jokes and poked fun
at the girls who identified as
feminists for being “crazy.”
Girls who were not inter-
ested in saying anything else
only laughed with them. I re-
member watching in disgust
and confusion as girls at my
school — some of whom were
even my friends — would
proudly announce that they
don’t consider themselves
feminists just so that they’d
be applauded by the boys. I
could not fathom why they
chose to view feminism as a
surface-level ideology, fixat-
ing on buzzwords like “man-
hating” and “wage gap”
while overlooking the soci-
etal benefits from the over-
arching goals of women’s lib-
eration.
On the other hand, I realized
that feminism came so natu-
rally to me because it did not
defy the values or the prac-
tices that I was raised upon —
it actually gave them a name.
I grew up in a household
where my sisters and I were
encouraged to shoot for the
stars and be ambitious with
our goals, to defy gendered
career expectations and to
never give in to socially con-
structed gender roles. Both
of my parents worked full
time and distributed chores
among themselves equal-
ly. I grew up watching my
dad cook and clean and my
brothers being given equal
responsibility in maintaining
the home. The contradictory
attitudes that I encountered
while coming to terms with
my feminist identity motivat-
ed me to take Introduction
to Women’s Studies upon
starting at the University of
Michigan.
While much of the class
was introducing and giving
names to basic concepts like
intersectionality, patriarchy
and male-gaze, I noticed
a vast difference between
the backgrounds of the stu-
dents who were enrolled in
the course and how that in-
fluenced the ways in which
they absorbed and compre-
hended the course mate-
rial. I found myself engaged
in productive conversation
with students of color more
than I did with the white
students in the course. Dur-
ing the weekly discussion
sections where we would
share individual interpreta-
tions of the readings based
on our own experience, I
was shocked by how unin-
formed many of my white,
straight, financially privi-
leged, cisgender classmates
were about the struggles that
marginalized
communities
confront without reflecting
on their own privileges. And
while I would never deny the
fact that objectively, being a
woman in itself is a margin-
alized identity that suffers
from patriarchal oppression,
for me and other women of
color, it is our intersecting
identities that really amplify
the impacts of being a wom-
an. The yearning to have
conversations
with
more
people who understood how
my intersectionality impact-
ed my feminist experience
prompted me to enroll in an
upper-level Arab American
Feminism course during my
second semester.
One of the most important
themes that Susan touches
upon in her writing — also
reiterated
throughout
al-
most every lesson of my
WGS classes — is the role
that white western feminism
plays in aiding the misun-
derstanding of women who
are not white, Western, cis-
gender, financially privileged
or straight. White western
feminism is a one-dimen-
sional ideology that fails to
regard the ways in which a
person’s intersecting identi-
ties influence their feminist
experience. It applies the
same European/U.S.-centric
critiques to populations and
cultures all over the world,
failing to account for differ-
ent cultural practices and
traditions in the fight for
gender equality. In the words
of Susan, it places an em-
phasis on the experience of
“liberated, assertive Western
women with voices” while
depicting women from the
global south as women who
are in need of liberation from
their oppressive societies.