Her Campus: So, let’s start simple. What is your education background in?
anupama jain: My PhD is in English but my research also uses psychology, sociology, and anthropology because I work in certain areas that are very connected in identity and history of identity, so all of those fields come into play.
HC: How long have you been teaching?
aj: I’ve been teaching since I was in graduate school, and I’ve been teaching women’s studies since then, alongside teaching English, mostly literature classes. I also started a business last year. This is my business card. *hands me the card pictured below* In my field, these days, for every job for a professor there are 400 people with PhDs in English who are applying. There’s a backlog of people and the numbers aren’t there. So, that’s what probably led me to starting a business. And I teach pretty much a class a semester in gender studies.
HC: What’s your business?
aj: It’s basically the same kind of work. I look at the way that people tell stories about identity and how that leads to material effects. So that lends itself to diversity inclusion consulting. So I work with a lot of small organizations that want to be more diverse and also want to be more inclusive of different races, people with different kinds of abilities, or different needs in the workplace. Gender diversity is certainly a big issue. Though I would say in Pittsburgh, a lot of businesses I work with are really concerned with having no racial diversity. And in the not-for-profit world, almost 75% of the employees are women, so they don’t have a lack of female representation. The leadership tends to be men: so only 25% of the leadership are women even though 75% of the workers are women. So that’s a problem. But organizations are really, really concerned that, in Pittsburgh, a lot of them are almost entirely white and they serve a lot of communities that are not entirely white, so there’s a real need to understand that. I talk to government and city groups to help with understanding why they aren’t meeting their own ideal of how they can be an inclusive organization. It’s only a year old so it’s new and scary, but at the same time, I feel like a lot of what I do is educating people about histories and understanding that they have certain assumptions that are false. So, it’s like Intro to Feminist Theory.
HC: Right, the class you teach, Intro to Feminist Theory. What drew you to that subject?
aj: I had been missing teaching gender studies, so I was basically reaching out to the director of gender studies, and then Todd said that this was the class that’s available. It was actually a brand-new course when I taught it for the first time two spring semesters ago, so I designed it from scratch. It’s a very popular class partly because it fills the gen-ed philosophy requirement. And we keep having such a huge demand that every semester for the last like five, they’ve added sections, which is really great. I think students want to talk about gender, I think one of the big things I hear from students over and over is, “Why didn’t we do this in high school? Why do we wait until college to actually have an opportunity for focused attention to these subjects?”
HC: What is your favorite part of teaching that class?
aj: So one thing I did this time, which is actually one of my favorite things, is the student presentations. I actually really like seeing the students get psyched and talk about their own work. Students can write a paper or they can just do projects, and students have done just some really, really cool projects. One of them created a blog “Why Pitt Needs Feminism” that’s still sort of active. This is at a different institution I taught at, but a student decided she really wanted to encourage safe sex on campus, and the way she did that was she blew up photos of diseased genitalia and put them up in the dining hall. And it was like, “Think this is awful?! Practice safe sex!” That’s the thing, it’s partly unpredictable. And sometimes I’m like, “Wow, that’s not what I would’ve advised or encouraged.” But it’s what you chose to do that has help you come to some sense of what you want.
HC: I think a lot of our readers might believe strongly in feminist ideals and equal rights for women but still shy away from the feminist label. Do you think you could comment on why that might be?
aj: It strikes me as just a very odd cultural prejudice that people have really become convinced that feminism is a bad thing. There’s so much information out there that I think it’s hard to sift through it. It’s very important as an educator, and I say this in my diversity sessions, too, I say, “You need to have some basic information and you need to assume you don’t know things.” I think that many people assume, and I have the same tendency, but I’ve been trained to really think deconstructively like, “Why do I think that? Do I have a really good reason to think that?” I think it’s important to also say feminists come in all sorts of – always repeat that, right? – feminists are not all the same. Not using the word “feminist” and the backlash against gender rights was very successful, unfortunately. There’s an article that I will send you that you might find interesting, and I just think it was a really good example of why people might not use it [the word] and why feminism has come to be a “dirty” word.
HC: I just wonder what we would stand to gain if the word wasn’t stigmatized the way it is.
aj: Well, I think it’s two things. You’ve read about postfeminism? It’s not as popular now, but there was a moment where people were really like, “We’re past that, let’s just stop talking about it,” and what we stand to gain is a more realistic image of what people’s lives are like, how they live those lives, and I think it’s great to have an ideal that says “Yes! We’re postfeminist! We don’t need this anymore!” But, to confuse that ideal with reality is really harmful to a lot of people and we don’t have fairness in families and the workplace and in education, we don’t have the kind of fairness we might strive for. So we’d gain something, we’d have a clearer picture of actual reality. And then once you have that, you have a better opportunity to make it more like the ideal. So, if you’re in denial and you’re saying “we’re post-race” or “we’re post-gender” while we’re not? And the people saying that are people who have power or privilege because of whatever they’re saying we don’t need to worry about, and then they convince the people being oppressed by that system to join them. And I do think it would create more solidarity among women if they were able to say it because I do think there are ways in which women are encouraged to not stand in solidarity with one another.
The link to the article anupama referenced can be found here.
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