Last week Lewis & Clark College hosted the 35th Annual Gender Studies Symposium, three days of panels, round table discussions, keynote addresses, and more speaking to the theme Game On: Gender and Sexuality in Play. The gender studies symposium always showcases an incredible array of interdisciplinary social commentary that bridges different academic theories and fields and highlights the work of students, faculty, community members, and nationally (and internationally) renowned speakers and academics. Gender studies is a field where theories of place, space and landscape, race and inequality, ability, economics, language, education, and artwork combine in mind-blowing configurations of queerness, justice, gender, and being. For another post regarding the overlaps between the Gender Studies Symposium and Environmental Theory, see Tasha’s post on dynamics of power.
The first keynote speaker of the symposium was David J. Leonard, professor and chair of the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. His presentation was called “Do All Lives Matter on Saturday Night?:Race, Gender, and College Parties.” In his presentation, Leonard framed the business of selling college and university education in the United States as a touristic endeavor. He argued that by building luxurious living and athletic facilities and capitalizing on narratives such as “college is the best four years of your life,” “what happens in college stays in college,” and that college is somehow isolated from the “real world,” colleges and universities (like resorts, parks, casinos, and vacation destinations) commodify experience. Through this lens, he characterized college and university as a type of utopia: a safe bubble where young people can learn by making mistakes and experience pleasure by doing things like going to parties. These parties were the subject of his presentation. Recent news has highlighted college parties with racist stereotypes as themes, for instance “tacos and tequila,” “cowboys and Indians,” “ghetto,” “hip hop,” and many more which appropriate and caricature people of color.
Thee premise of Leonard’s presentation is the claim that the college campus is a utopia, or imagined utopia. Leonard argues that the concept of the college as a utopia apart from the “real world” in the same way that Las Vegas is separated from the morals and values of the “real world” is inherently exclusive. He asks: if the college campus is not part of the “real world,” who’s experiences does that erase? if pleasure and fun is given primacy, is it at who’s expense? who’s pleasure matters? if college is fun, it is fun for whom and at what cost? who gets to learn and who is the object of that lesson? who is responsible? and finally, who gets to live? Oftentimes, it is the white, male, cisgendered, straight students who matter. This fun and pleasurable experience sold by colleges and universities is had at the expense of those who are black and brown, queer, poor (including staff members at an institution for whom the campus is very much part of their “real world”), or otherwise marginalized. Racist party themes are only one (very visible) way that these dynamics of power and equity manifest. Within this utopia of college, cultures of rape, racism, exclusion, and dehumanization are deeply embedded.
The island geography of Utopia – Titelholzschnitt der Ausgabe von 1516 (via Wikipedia)
Utopia, from its inception 500 years ago, is contingent upon controlled space, isolation, and scripted social norms that all coalesce in a culture of exclusion and homogeneity. Sir Thomas More’s original 1516 Utopia was an island. This geography controls who has access to utopia and who doesn’t. Who has the luxury of time and means to seek a utopia, whether by attending university or sailing across the ocean in search of a perfect island society? This geography implies that not everyone is necessarily welcome to utopia. Only those who can get there and can abide by the ideals of any particular utopia are allowed. Another way to think about this is to ask: who gets to immigrate to utopia? does anyone get displaced through this seeking?
As Hilke Kuhlmann writes in “The Illusion of Permanence: Work Motivation and Membership Turnover at Twin Oaks Community,” one of the patterns of this (apparently) successful utopian commune in rural Virginia is that the demographic which is drawn to the community is “white, middle class, well educated, and dissatisfied with mainstream society” with “left-wing political attitudes” (Kuhlmann 2001). The illusion of permanence created in part by this homogeneity hides the high turnover rate of the community and complicates the difference between permanence of community versus permanence of the individual within that community. This demographic observation about the whiteness and class background of the seekers of utopia at Twin Oaks perhaps demonstrates a larger pattern of the inherent whiteness of imagined utopias.
The Pacific Northwest is another imagined and perceived utopia, one that we happen to be situated within. From the narratives of Manifest Destiny, Oregon Country was rich in resources and served as a destination for pioneers seeking an agricultural landscape of abundance. Other places in the west, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, also have utopic origin myths. More recently, Oregon has been the location of many utopic commune experiments, highlighted in James Kopp’s book Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopic Heritage. In fictions such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, the Pacific Northwest takes on a ecological utopic identity, where theories of utopia merge with environmental values. While all utopias must be, to an extent, an ecotopia where food and water is abundant and land sustains the inhabitants, the Pacific Northwest brand of ecotopia fuses environmental spirituality within its imagination of ideal societies. These imagined ecological utopias and dystopias of fiction, from Ecotopia to Atwood’s Orynx and Crake to Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth imagine the world through the male and often colorblind lens and are too often preoccupied with sexualized female characters of past and present. The dystopias are marked by the absence of male pleasure where the utopias are marked by the possibility of it. These dynamics of pleasure are not unlike Leonard’s arguments about the subjects of pleasure on college campuses.
This utopian mythology persists today with the Portlandia trope. Portland is the city where young people go to retire, where the environment is put first. With spatial policies such as the Urban Growth Boundary, Portland is a sort of urban island within an agricultural state abundant with public land and open space. And although the common misperception is the diverse and progressive character of Portland, what really synches Portland’s status as a utopia is its incredible whiteness. The common narrative of the “dream of the 90’s Portlandia” very much falsely tells us that Portland has progressed past racism. As evidenced by Portland’s position as the “whitest city in America,” Oregon’s remarkably racist founding legislation, Portland’s landscape of redlining and gentrification, and the personal experience of black people living here, Portland has in no way progressed beyond racism. Portland, like college campuses and like the college parties that happen on the weekend, does not exist in a vacuum apart from the rest of Oregon or the rest of the United States. I argue that, while racism is deeply embedded in campus cultures nationwide as Leonard argues, racism is particularly pervasive in the Pacific Northwest due to these historic structures of utopic whiteness.