More Bio-Power!

This project challenged me in ways I was not anticipating.  I sometimes forget that I have to use new technology and work outside of my paper-writing comfort zone.  My math skills definitely got some practice with this, since I had to translate my social privileges into numerical values in order to graph them.  The most difficult aspect, however, was considering my social location as able to be pinpointed and as resulting from the various “-isms” that have funneled me into different categories throughout my life.  I have always theoretically understood that I am a product of my environment and that my race, gender, and sexual orientation have definitely impacted that, but to consider the broader systemic implications of all of my identifiers was incredibly eye-opening.

  To begin “mapping” myself, I made a list of all of the “-isms,” identifiers, or oppressions that pertain to me.  I then wrote the following short piece that I had planned to turn into a word map, expecting that it would draw out my social location for me: 

My position is one of considerable privilege.  I am white from a middle-class family with a neutral, “white sounding” last name.  I am at an age where I am neither criticized for being too young and inexperienced nor too old and potentially over-qualified, and I am the most educated member of my extended family.  I am a U.S. citizen, in good physical health, and fit dominant notions of accepted physical attractiveness.  My biological sex and gender identity match and I fall within a culturally accepted gender category.  I was biologically conceived by a married mother and father and, as far as I know, am capable of bearing my own children.  The religious tradition in which I was raised is not visibly apparent and, if it were, it is widely accepted as within the norm in the U.S.  I speak American English without any noticeable accent, the fact that I am bilingual is not associated with my race, and I have been able to travel extensively.

A middle-class upbringing means that I am accustomed to home and vehicle ownership and a considerable degree of financial security.  We never bought new cars, but in our family of four we always had at least two insured cars.  We were able to travel to see family in other parts of the country, we always had gifts at birthdays and holidays, in my case Christmas.  We were able to take relatively expensive ski vacations, and went to Disney World.  I attended high quality public schools which had primarily white middle-class students.  I was able to attend college with help from my family and did not need to rely solely on loans or scholarships, and was able to study abroad and travel.

The two major “-isms” that affect me are sexism and heterosexism.  Being queer and seeing through a queer lens while not necessarily being seen as queer manifests itself in distinct ways.  When I am alone I navigate with a degree of heterosexual privilege because of my femme appearance, but this disappears when I am with my partner or other visibly queer friends.  An interesting complication happens when I become visibly queer, and that is I am less prone to be targeted with sexist or predatory advances from straight men.  My queerness is further invisibilized because of my engagement ring and the gender-neutral pronunciation of “fiancée.”  As a result, I must constantly “out” myself in order to be seen as queer.  

If only it were that simple.  The resulting word cloud was pretty, but not nearly as complex as the systems and intersections I was hoping to represent.  It wasn’t all for naught, however, because by writing it I was better able to situate myself and get a better perspective of where I have privilege.  After deciding I would try a bubble chart on infogram, I got stuck when I wasn’t able to “graph” my privilege the way that I wanted.  The suggestions and discussion in class on Tuesday were quite helpful and I was finally able to translate my qualitative understandings into quantitative representations.  I had to figure out the columns in the existing chart so that I could change the location and size of the bubbles, which took a few tries, but I finally got it.  I then assigned a value between 1,000 and 1,000,000, since the graph was already on such a large scale, to the level of privilege I experience within a give spectrum.  For example, I associated being white with the most privilege which meant I entered 1,000,000.  Giving numerical value to my social privilege felt uncomfortable, but in a profound way that definitely impacted my concept of privilege as social capital.  

Once I was able to manipulate the size of the bubbles in the chart, I wanted to spread them out so that they didn’t look uniform and linear.  I spent quite a bit of time going through different options for how to organize them, but I kept coming up with too many contradictions.  I considered assigning designations such as “primary identifiers” and “secondary identifiers” in order to rank them, but the constantly changing landscape of social interaction is such that what seems like a primary identifier, such as race, can become secondary or even tertiary in some situations.  I finally settled on making it as random as possible to demonstrate the constant shifting of privilege and bio-power.  

The most challenging part of this project, but also the most educational, was the visual representation of space.  I am able to see the space that my privilege takes as space that is taken away from others.  The places where I maneuver with ease are places where others do not, and this is an intentional systemic occurrence.  In order to make this even more visually powerful, I made a corresponding map of a queer, undocumented, illiterate, transwoman of color whose primary language is not English.  This highlighted the scope of my privilege more than my own map alone as well as the scope of systemic oppressions.  I also made a final word map with this entire reflection, which further highlighted my privilege, literally.  

This project should be a requirement for every Women Studies major, if not for every student.  It is one thing to sit in a class and discuss privilege, but to see it in a different light is instrumental in understanding and operating as a conscious human.  It is especially useful to have had the freedom to design my map however I wanted because the end result is something that makes sense to me and helps me to visualize my place in the world, which is something that I have often been afforded the privilege of not needing to do.  I plan on hanging these up in my office to continue to remind and inspire me why I do the work I do.