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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. 

