Experience

(upbeat music) Welcome to Feminist Keywords, the podcast companion to our 2021 book, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, published with New York University Press. You don't need to have the book to listen, but if you want to buy it, or if it was assigned for a class maybe, it's available at all major online booksellers, including NYU Press at keywords.nyupress.org, which is also listed in show notes. We create keywords for gender and sexuality studies as a readable resource to bring important concepts and debates in feminist, queer, and transparent politics to your kitchen table, classroom, discussion group, what club, or anywhere you want to engage in these conversations. We asked 77 leading thinkers to write on 70 terms ranging from hashtag to intersectionality, reproduction to woman. In Feminist Keywords, we'd stand on the book by interviewing our authors so you can hear them in their own voices, talk about the significance of their keyword. We hope that these interviews generate conversations, debates, and additional questions about the urgent issues that face you in your community. I am your host for the day, Amy Bong, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at Commodal College, and I am a member of the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, which includes, Kiela Wasana-Tonkins, R&I-Zera, Karma-R-Chabbins, Vishana Goman, and Amber Janila-Musser. For this episode, my guest is Dr. Mimi Teen-Win, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, or Vanishing Pain. Dr. Wins, first book, The Gift of Freedom, Award, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages was published by Duke University Press in 2012, and won the Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her next book, called The Promise of Beauty, will be coming out in October 2024, also with Duke University Press. It's worth noting that Dr. Wins writing began when she was publishing Zings back in the 1990s, and she's also been busy as part of an editorial collective behind Bontan Remix, a critical BTS reader, which is also coming soon in August from Duke University Press. And perhaps most relevantly for today, Professor Wins wrote the entry in our volume for the keyword experience. Mimi, welcome to Feminist Keywords. - Thank you. I'm excited to talk about this, and I love the experience of writing for the collection, so it's fun that we get to do this. - Well, I love teaching your keyword as part of doing introductions, actually. And along those lines, I was just wondering, do you, I did a little intro of you, but do you want to tell us who you are in your own words? A little bit of your story, tell us your pronouns, tell us what you care about. I don't know, what's on your mind these days? - My pronouns are she, hers, and I've been also telling people that they are ceasefire recently. But yeah, if I'm pressed to describe who I am, I say that I am an old punk who teaches feminist theory, and that really consistently across my different lives as an old punk and a scholar, I am interested in those questions about those things that are given to us as social goods, like freedom or beauty or democracy, and seeing what these do beyond what they claim to do, and that pretty much guides my entire approach to everything. So across all the work I've done from like all my zines to all my scholarship, it's basically that approach of like, what are all these things that we were, where these concepts that are given to us as seemingly obvious or self-evident, what are they actually doing in claiming to be obvious and self-evident, which is why the Kiwer's project is so important? - Well, I mean, to be a total cornball, it sounds like your experience might be grounding your scholarship. - I really do want to ask, - Why do you think this word at this Kiwer's experience is an important one for gender and sexuality cities? - I think the Kiwer's experience is so important for gender women's studies. I started the entry talking about the movement maximum, the personal's political, right? That is about underscoring the connections between personal experiences and larger structures. But then what do we really mean by that? And that is something that I think is really important because one of the things that feminist theory is about, is doing is challenging the kind of established truths about what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence, what counts as history, and what is so important about that as well, these kind of the underpinnings of our contemporary epistemological conditions, how we decide, how we know what we know, how we establish what is true and what is not. These are all key to key projects and research interests for feminist theory, right? So, feminist theory and other theories that do similar kinds of work, like in ethnic studies, for instance, are often accused of being too subjective, too ideological, rather than grounded in fact, or kind of objective evaluation. And so, one of the projects of feminist theory has always been to then ask, what are the standards by which these measures, these evaluations of knowledge are being, where did these standards come from? Where did these, how are they measured? How are they established? And so, the question of experience, I think, is so key because it is undergirding a lot of our sort of contemporary philosophical and political traditions for how we know what we know. And because feminist theory is about taking on these foundational quote-unquote truths that it becomes a key question and keyword in that realm as well. - Absolutely, no, I was mentioning to you that I use your keyword entry on the first day of class when I teach a lot of my gender studies courses so that people as a way into introductions because I parrot with this exercise by my partner's very good friend, Eugenia Zoroski, the title of the exercise is Where Do You Know From? Instead of, and so she writes up this little short excerpt about how she learned from Catherine McKittrick, black feminist geographer, just to replace that question, where are you from? To where do you know from? Where do you learn from? And it was such a powerful, like subtle, but nuanced shift to situator analogies. And your essay just really gets to that in its explanation of standpoint of epistemology and grounding in one of the color feminism. And it's just, it's such a great exercise and the students really get it. So thank you for that work. So I wanted to ask like how do you see this word of concept getting misused? What does it not mean? Again, the movement max in the person is political, the idea that our personal experiences are connected to larger structures is seems common-sensical. Now, part of what is interesting to think about is that that itself has foundations in a liberal humanist framework, right? So there's a way in which a liberal humanist framework for all that it is often the target of feminist theory or critical ethnic studies or whatever, there's a way in which it still emerges or pops up in an unexpected ways that I do think we have to be vigilant about. So it does, for instance, so it does pop up when we talk about experience, right? It is, for example, the way that we talk about experience is not disconnected from a tradition in Western philosophy of like pragmatic individualism, right? Which is this philosophical kind of turn or bent that is very common-sensical that asserts that knowledge of right and wrong is based on one's best understanding and a rational evaluation of your interest and stuff like that. So it assumes that reason informs knowledge and that the knowledge is arrived at through some kind of rational thought that then informs action. So it assumes a certain set of sort of transparent and pragmatic relationships between sensory knowledge of the world, a rational interpretation of that and then also between thought and deed, right? So a part of the problem with this set of equations is that it assumes that there is this transparency, that knowledge is some kind of clear expression of some inner truth that has arrived at through some process of reasoning and this is not necessarily distinct from how something like standpoint epistemology is often described as well. The kind of language of specialized knowledges that emerges from, for instance, Marxist theory is not necessarily a full departure from that kind of understanding of experience where the imagination that drawing on haigle, this idea that the state of consciousness is arrives from a result of a person's realization of their struggle against the master, the slave master dynamic. It emerges in Marx and Engels argument about class consciousness and the dialectic and giving rise to the idea of standpoint of the proletariat as an epistemic position that provides a sort of superior starting point to understanding and eventually changing the world and challenging the controllers and owners of capital, right? It's like there are certain kinds of leaps that I think are can become troubling. - It really seems like you're working to destabilize or unsettle experience at the very end of the city. You see, it's not a fixed point, but an ongoing relation. And I thought that was a really beautiful formulation to add more experience from as some sort of pure category. - The thing is experience has been both so empowering and enabling, but it also can be limiting, right? So recourse to experience and the sort of dailyness of oppression has fueled some of the most dynamic social movements of the last century plus, right? Testimonials to experience are so powerful and moving and they do a lot of work. But they can also be limiting when there's kind of an uncritical dimension that making certain experiences visible is not necessarily always the same as providing an analysis of the way that ideology or history actually works to create that experience. - It feels like you want to take experience away from like the noun and make it and focus on the verb, like the making the conditions of the experience, right? So there are times that I feel like your entry would be so useful in counteracting how people sometimes take up experience and use it as an exclusionary or like harmful tool against others. And I don't know, can you think, can you talk about how you've seen that unfold problematically in contemporary moments? - This is part of the problem of experience, right? Because the imagination that a certain experience that might be shared with others is, can constitute a central and even sort of common sensical formation for understanding all persons within that are imagined to fit within a certain category that would have less experience. It's already troubled because it assumes a certain kind of vision of the individual as a very bounded rational self or who would be once the obstacles are done away with, right? So in liberal humanism, those obstacles were understood as like superstition and barbarism or whatever, it marks as humanism. It's the alienation of the proletariat from their labor and humanist feminism. It's this imagination of the alienation of a woman from her authentic self through some idea of false consciousness. And I do think that we see certain problems come into play there, right? So I talk in the entry about how the imagination that the experience of being a woman it includes certain kinds of universal experiences, like that has been a long time target of women of color theorists in feminist theory, right? For instance, in the 1970s, there was a lot of scholarship about how women around the world had in common the experience of childbirth and mothering. And there was all this work that was generated about that. But then a lot of women of color were like, actually, this is not true for XYZ reasons, the experience of mothering or childbirth are understood really differently in different places for according to histories, ideological, cultural, religious differences in terms of how we interpret that experience. And so we saw that happening throughout the sort of, those, you know, I don't like to use the wave metaphors for talking about waves of feminist theory, but for a shorthand, I will say second wave. So feminist argue that that's the experience of giving birth and childbearing or the foundation of a feminist standpoint, but of course, again, women of color feminist pushed against it. And so we see that I think in the contemporary moment, returning also in the kind of trans exclusionary arguments that are being made supposedly in the name of a feminist politic where arguments for trans women's exclusion from the category of woman is based on this imagination of a essential feminist or feminine or female or whatever standpoint that imagines that the experience of giving birth or childbearing or the biological possibility of doing so is what defines, quote unquote, a woman, right? So we can see this kind of transphobic argument that argues that living in a particular body necessarily produces a particular consciousness that can only be understood by those people with those bodies. So we see this problem of imagining that experience is just reflection of some kind of reality, right, that the experience of being a woman is just a reflection of a physical material biological reality of being in a particular body and that there's some kind of transparent access to that experience of being a woman when it's equated and made commensurate to being in a particular body in a particular way. And we see the trans exclusionary argument, marshaling a standpoint epistemology to make its moves against trans women, right? And non-binary persons and all that stuff, yeah. There's this other subtle, but really important, profound point that you make when you quote "Norma, all are calling in the piece." And I'll just read the quotation out for those of you who don't have the book yet. One becomes a woman, quote unquote, in ways that are much more complex than in a simple opposition to men, in cultures in which asymmetrical race and class relations are a central organizing principle of society, one may also become a woman in opposition to other women. And I was such a great quotation. It's one of my favorites, right? "Norma, all are calling too." It made me actually reflect on our current political moment, too. We're coming up on an election. And Trump is going to be on the ticket. It looks like again. And I just wonder about what does the feminist look like? Where do you see the most pressing interventions to be made in feminist politics right now? For me, I don't think it lies in electoral politics. I think that we have seen the dismantling of abortion access under a Democratic president. We have seen exponential rise in anti-trans legislation, in state legislatures all over. And we do not see at any federal level any kind of political will to challenge any of these very virulent anti-trans proposals and laws that are being put on the book. So I don't think electoral politics is where a feminist politics is going to make any kind of actual difference. I see a feminist politics instead in the mutual aid funds that have been running for a long time in the abortion funds that have existed for decades now and are doing crucial work to get people access to reproductive health care. We see it in efforts to provide also gender-affirming health care that are also operating as these kind of mutual aid funds. I think we also see it in the very active mobilizations against prisons and cop cities. And I think we're seeing also the relevance of something like I teach the transnational feminist practices against war piece, which was a collectively written piece that came out in 2001 when the US was starting. It's war on terror and which has not ended. I see the relevance of that as well in that piece. Also, there is a critique of how and the experience of the grief or horror or shock of the 9/11 moment being marshalled for the imperial ambitions of the United States. And I see that happening now as well. So I think that is where the pressure has to be brought to bear on a feminist politics that makes note of and actively works against the marshaling of some experience over others. Absolutely. No, I mean, I'm reading between the lines here, but it's also so overt in many of our current situations. Yeah. And I think that's right. The right verb experience gets marshalled, which feels like a warmongering term specifically, right? To legitimize or attempt to rationalize and build momentum towards more violence and say Islamophobia. So this is a really good moment to reflect on how experience gets marshalled. Yeah, marshalled for purposes that range from the trans-exclusionary project of it oftentimes pursuing legislation as well as a kind of social stigmatization of trans person. So basically into non-existence through the marshaling of an idea of a universal experience of being a woman. And then we see it also in terms of the current moment in which we see the delegitimizing of Palestinian life. Yeah. This is all to say that experience is not like these are identities and identifications and categories of being and becoming that are producing relations of power that are constantly changing. So like our understanding of our experience at any given moment is the narrative that the story, it's a history, it's something constructed, we tell it, we speak it. It's not simply there to be found. There's so much other work that has to happen in order to make an experience have some kind of impact as a political lever. In whatever direction a person might want to use it. So it's really about thinking about experience, not just as a sort of mere registering of the senses or a property that we hold or that we passively receive and go through or whatever, it's actively being constructed all the time. As we move through the world and we encounter one another, our experience of the world is absolutely changeable and it has to change, right? It doesn't make sense to stay static. It doesn't make sense to imagine that who we are is a static property that we can just point to as if it had boundaries, as if it had some kind of substance to it that was permanent because there's no permanence. Well, I really appreciate your thoughts on experience, Mimi. It was really a pleasure to talk with you today as you were just closing out some of those thoughts about how experiences will necessarily be subject to change. I couldn't help thinking about one of the great thinkers I always like to go to, Octavia Butler, who is one of whose famous quotes is, "All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." It's a beautiful way to think about experience as change rather than experience being marshalled towards the ends of quote unquote safety and security and static holding on to status quo. So I really appreciate like putting that finer point on it really helped me learn about what you're getting up there. So anyway, thank you so much for spending time with us today, Mimi. I really want to thank my guest, Dr. Mimi Win, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, or be in a champagne and author of the Experience Entry. I'd also like to thank Professor Karen Thompson at USC for supporting this podcast series, an audio engineer, Allison Holley for producing the podcast. This podcast is supported by consortium for gender-sexuality race and public culture, a male-infunded intersectional studies collective at the University of Southern California, which brings together researchers working on gender, race and sexuality in popular culture, while also translating that research for the public square. It is also funded and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Buffalo. Thanks for listening to feminist keywords, the audio companion to keywords for gender and sexuality studies.