Consider the Container: Critical Reflections on Norms as Feminist Practice

Abstract

Consider the ContainerCritical Reflections on Norms as Feminist Practice Julia Watts Belser (bio) In her powerful opening to this roundtable, Judith Plaskow begins by acknowledging a frustrating reality: that even though “the editors of the JFSR [Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion] have been committed to inclusion from the moment of founding the journal,” these efforts “have not been enough to keep it from remaining a fundamentally white enterprise” (3). As Plaskow makes plain, the pervasive whiteness of JFSR has persisted despite deliberate attention to racial equity in the journal’s intellectual content and its editorial leadership. Even though “Black women and other women of color have both sat on the editorial board and been coeditors,” Plaskow writes, “the container of the JFSR still feels like a white container” (3). While I am committed to a critical examination of whiteness and to the ongoing practice of deep learning, accountability, and action in the service of racial justice, I am no expert on the specific structures that shape the white container Plaskow names. I write as a white Jewish woman. Whiteness is the sea in which I swim. But I want to reflect on Plaskow’s insight through a strategy I’ve learned through anti-ableist practice, a strategy that asks us to pay attention to the container itself. Disability liberation work has taught me that disrupting and dismantling ableism requires critical attention to the basic norms and assumptions that undergird and shape our work, for it is these norms and expectations—built into the very fabric of what we do and how we do it—that feed and nourish the ubiquity of dominant culture, that sustain its investments in white supremacy, misogyny, Eurocentrism and Christian dominance, queer and trans hatred, ableism, classism, and more. It has become commonplace in feminist circles to recognize the facts of dominance. But it is difficult work to uncover the specific ways these norms become [End Page 67] expressed in daily life. Puerto Rican Jewish feminist Aurora Levins Morales recalls how her mother taught her “to identify the markings of sexism the way she taught me the markings of birds, the colors of paint—in the course of daily living.”1 So too, I ask: How do we recognize the particular architectures that build up the edifice of whiteness? In my Religion and Disability Studies course, I run a semester-long Analyzing Access Project, where students probe the norms and expectations that shape permissible modes of moving, thinking, feeling, perceiving, and expressing oneself at a religious or secular site of their choice. Through site visits and critical reflection, students investigate how access and inaccessibility get produced through tangible built environments, through specific religious and cultural practices, through myriad tiny choices. The first site visit asks students to map the particulars of the physical space—to notice centers and peripheries, sight lines and pinch points; to parse out the logics of the space, how power intersects with architecture, how people know where they belong and where they shouldn’t go, to recognize not just what designers intended but where gathering happens in practice. The second site visit focuses on time—asking students to consider how assumptions about proper pace and normative time get encoded in everyday practice; to investigate how we know when we are “on time” or “out of time.” We probe the unwritten expectations that govern how much time we are afforded to accomplish certain tasks, how long a body is expected to hold certain positions: to sit, to stand, to be silent, to sing. The third site visit examines affect—the norms that govern the kind of energy we are expected to bring to a space, the rules of decorum, the way we’re supposed to feel. What happens when our feeling doesn’t fit within the permissible range, when we’re too loud, too quiet, too angry, too sad? The project works to make visible and tangible norms many of us previously regarded as neutral. We learn to pinpoint specific acts and processes through which exclusion and marginality unfold. One of the tools we use to examine the unwritten logics of a site is to ask: What would disrupt the expectations...