She is an associate professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies along with African studies at Penn State, Decker holds multiple degrees, including a PHD from Emory University, and has written multiple books and articles on African culture and militarism.
HC: So, I hear you are writing a book, tell me about it.
AD: I have a book that I’ve already published with one of my colleagues about democratization in Africa that looks at politics from a much more inclusive perspective. It looks at everything being potentially political as a way to understand the way to understand African politics. And then I wrote another book, which was published two years ago, that looked at women’s lives in Uganda during military rule. And now currently I’m working on two additional books, one is a gendered history of women’s lives in Uganda after Idi Amin’s dictatorship was overthrown [looking at] how once the military is in power it never goes away] and the other project is a history of disappearance and forced disappearance in post-colonial Africa, so much of the work that’s been done about state violence has been focused on Latin America, so I want to use that kind of framing to see what’s going on in Africa. So I’m keeping busy.
HC: So, I know one of your focuses is on militarization. What do you think of the bill being passed that says women can now be drafted? How does that impact the idea of militarization, in Africa or other countries?
AD: It’s interesting – there are currently only two countries in the world where women are required to do mandatory military service and those are Israel and Eritrea, which is in Northern Africa, but what’s interesting is that women’s service requirements are not the same as men’s. In Israel I believe that men are required to serve three years and women are only required to serve two—or else it might be one and two—but it’s not equivalent in either case. The opportunities for women after service are not necessarily the same in terms of benefits, as men. So on one level, it’s important to create a system that says women are equally capable of participating in military service, so if we’re going to have a draft it makes sense that women should be drafted the same as men, but we can’t necessarily assume the benefits of service are going to be equitable. Just as we know that women and men do similar work [inside and] outside of the military and they don’t get paid the same. So it’s an important step for equality, but it’s something that we should look at really skeptically. As someone who doesn’t promote militarization in general, I get really hesitant about the idea of trying to promote equality by promoting militarism.
HC: There’s a new movie coming out, called “Hidden Figures,” that talks about African-American women working at NASA in the 1960s. How do you think that women in STEM can promote equality in the military or in general?
AD: Certainly, in terms of equality it’s not just something that can be just the responsibility of women, right? So it has to be women and men working together, and I think the key is getting our society to realize that equality is beneficial for men and women. It actually increases the GDP, it’s beneficial on so many different layers, and it’s not just preferential treatment. So taking women seriously is something that’s good for everyone. I think giving women more opportunity to see themselves in STEM fields is an important step to recruiting women. [Women in STEM] have talked about not having any female role models or professors to look up to, so I think that’s an important step. I think young women’s confidence grows and their aspirations change as they see models of what they can be and I think that’s one of the reasons that the election is so devastating. At the very least, because it puts another white man in power, and we’ve had a lot of those. And it’s enough. There’s much more to be done [for equality] and going back to the same old status quo and in fact going back to a much more conservative political structure [doesn’t help promote equality].
HC: Do you have any role models?
AD: Oh yes, I have many. I think Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was the first elected female president of Liberia, was a very important figure, because she was able to serve as the first elected female president, but also to bring the country back from a very devastating war. And there are certainly things that she could have done differently, but one of the things she put front and center was to put women in key positions in her cabinet, and not just the kinds of feminized political positions; she put women as the minister of defense, minister of finance, in the key roles, so I thought that was really inspiring and awesome.
HC: If other places have female leaders, Liberia with Sirleaf and Britain with Margaret Thatcher, how can America bridge the gap? We came really close to having a female president.
AD: It’s interesting, because Margaret Thatcher’s a totally different kind of person and she’s in many ways a very patriarchal, masculine figure. There’s something important in at least seeing a female figure in that position of power because it creates possibilities, but we have to be really careful not to assume that women are necessarily going to represent women’s issues. And we see that in many different political structures, where women are elected but then they ‘go along to get along’ so they don’t necessarily promote women’s issues because they want to be taken seriously and often the assumption is that women’s issues are soft issues. It’s completely not true, but that’s the assumption. Sometimes men who are feminists are actually better allies for women’s overall outcomes than a woman. In either case, there have been many countries all around the world who have had women leaders and certainly, we’re one of the last remaining major powers that has not considered it, and I think it’s very antiquated.
HC: How did you get into women’s studies in the first place? How did you decide you wanted to make it into a career?
AD: It’s interesting, actually! It’s a fun question, because when I was an undergrad, I never really took women’s studies classes. I think I took one “women’s spirituality” class and I didn’t like it because for me it was too out there. I don’t even remember anything about it. I was Anthropology major and I was interested in culture. Culture was bigger and more significant, I thought. So I did culture and anthropology, and I studied abroad in Tanzania, and then I came back [to the University of Minnesota], graduated, and then I won a scholarship to do my master’s degree in Africa. Because of the scholarship I had to go to a country that I hadn’t lived in before, so I chose Uganda, because it was close to Tanzania, and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re close together. They’ll be similar.’ Silly of me. The main university in Uganda didn’t offer anthropology at the time, but they did have a women and genders studies program that was getting a lot of attention at the time. And my mom, who’s a feminist, said, “Oh, you should take a women’s studies class. You’d probably really like it.” And I was kind of [hesitant], kind of “Eh, I don’t know, I’m not a feminist,’ and I was 22 or 23 at the time, so old enough to have thought about these things. ‘I’m not a feminist, but…” — that was me. I was one of those classic people. So I went to Uganda, enrolled in the program, and it changed my life. I became exposed to exactly what feminism is, and once you learn about it accurately it makes so much sense. And the ways that the men and women who were teaching me about feminism were articulating it really resonated with me. So the kind of feminism and women’s studies that I was learning about was more applicable to the African continent, so I definitely loved it, did my master’s degree, and then decided I wanted to do a PhD in women’s studies, too. So I applied to a PhD program in the United States, and I was actually accepted into the top-ranked program in the country, and it was very exciting…So I got my PhD and was fortunate to get a job in a women’s studies program. My first job was at Purdue, Indiana University and then I came here [to Penn State] and I love it. I can’t imagine doing anything different, but it wasn’t my first choice [originally], and I had many of the same stereotypes [that others believed]. I look at women’s studies courses now, and I think, ‘Gosh. If I was an undergrad now, with the knowledge I have now, I could’ve done so much more.’ I was an activist, I was doing social justice work, but women’s studies weren’t on my radar. But I got here eventually, and by the age of 25 or so I was firmly grounded [in women’s studies]. I love what I do.
We wish her the best as she takes a semester to do research for her next book and look forward to seeing her back on campus soon!