sigelphoenix

When I was in college, I often had trouble making myself talk in class. This was for a couple of reasons, not just straight-up shyness or lack of confidence. I usually wanted to take the time to formulate what to say and how to say it - and often, by the time I did that, someone else had already said what I wanted to say, or the conversation would move on. I'm also not very good at thinking on my feet, so by the time I thought of something to contribute, someone else had already said what I wanted to say, or the conversation would move on ... or end completely. XD I would eventually become comfortable enough to talk more, a few weeks into the quarter after I'd gotten a better feel for the course material and the people in my class.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't talk much during the Q&A portions of the sessions I went to at the NWSA conference. I just didn't come up with questions for the presenters, or didn't feel confident enough to voice them. In fact, I didn't speak up until something like the fifth session I attended, which was also the last one I attended at all, on Saturday morning (I spent the afternoon writing my speech for our roundtable discussion ... and yes, I had a good reason for doing it that late :P).

I wish I could've done better. My professor told us that the most important part of conferences like this is networking, and being, you know, unable to talk made it difficult to meet people. On the other hand, I did what I could, and I can't beat myself up about it after the fact. Just do better next time I'm in this kind of situation.

Luckily, for our roundtable discussion, I had to talk: each of us spoke for about 1-2 minutes to provide some introductory framework, from which the discussion would expand. That much, at least, we could prepare beforehand. We wrote our statements and cleared them with each other, so we were all agreed on how we would introduce our session.

That's about all that was in our control, however. We didn't know how it would go until we walked into our scheduled room on Saturday afternoon ... which, by the way, was dark when I opened the door. I found the light, fretting that we had been forgotten by the staff - only to forget all about that when the lights came on and I saw that the room they had given us was enough to seat nearly 500 people. I think I blurted something like, "What the hell did they do?"

We certainly did not need that size of a room. We ended up with something like 15 people in our audience - which actually pleased me because that was on the higher end of attendance I had seen in other sessions. (As I mentioned in my last entry, there were dozens of sessions occurring simultaneously, so attendance was divided among many different rooms.) Also, we were in the second-to-last time slot on Saturday, which was the final day of sessions.

Anyway, we got up to our table at the front of the room and spoke. I had a lovely me-moment in which I leaned back too far in my folding chair and it threatened to fold up on me, and other group members had their own invisible-to-the-audience mini-crises, but we got through it. Those few minutes of speaking and listening to my teammates speak passed by in a kind of haze for me, but I'm pretty sure the audience was attentive and engaged.

Unfortunately, the discussion itself was not so rosy. A few of the audience members were awesome - participating in the discussion and really bringing some important things to the table. (In fact, one of them is doing research that dovetails quite nicely with our work, and we ended up exchanging emails.) However, there was a small but vocal minority that ended up derailing the conversation into a totally unrelated topic - and occasionally came out with some really ignorant (as in privileged) statements - and we were unable to bring the discussion back to a useful place by the time our hour-and-fifteen was up.

Without going into the nitty gritty details, I can sum up: My group's presentation was focused on expanding the understanding of aggressors, moving away from traditional feminist analyses that focus primarily on the victim, or take a simplistic aggressors-commit-violence-because-of-patriarchy model (for example, some feminists of color bring in analyses of racism and classism as well as sexism, but mainstream feminism hasn't really picked up on that yet). The hope is to come to a better understanding of why aggressors commit violence, so our efforts won't be limited to healing violence after the fact.

We got about five minutes of useful discussion about this. Then those aforementioned audience members jumped in, and eventually derailed the conversation into a discussion about biological determinism.

Let me be clear: we are trying to point out that framing the issue as just a "men commit violence against women" issue is inadequate. And then these people spent our discussion time talking about to what degree biology determines why men commit violence against women.

It probably won't surprise anyone when I say that our audience was predominantly (possibly totally) white, mostly middle-to-upper class (based on visual evidence), with only a couple of people visibly sexuality- or gender-queer. Non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy representatives were scarce; and non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy issues were being ignored.

We made some attempts to regain control of the conversation - calling on people who were being verbally railroaded by the hijackers, gently steering the discussion, etc. That didn't work. We talked about this amongst ourselves that night, and all of us are dissatisfied by our response. Because we only used polite tactics, instead of being firm and saying, "This is what our discussion is about. That is not. Let's get back to our discussion."

Why couldn't we do that? Partly because we were intimidated by the national, professional forum. Partly because the conversation derailers, however egregious the content of their words, were employing all the proper behaviors and not yelling or interrupting others (much). (And yes, this is definitely a class-based response - it's a middle-class assumption to think that people who speak more politely are more worth being heard.) And we just didn't trust our own voices, I think. We didn't have the confidence in ourselves to be assertive. This is something we have to learn to do.

This is an area in which I really disappointed myself. Once the open discussion began, I hoped to join the conversation - but the hesitation I described above kept me quiet, letting others speak first or silencing my own contributions because I didn't think they were good enough. Then, once everything got shot to hell, I didn't have a clue what to say anyway. I couldn't think of what to say to the hijackers without interrupting them. And I fell into that middle-class-mentality trap of thinking I had to give them time to speak. As a result, the only time I actually spoke during our roundtable discussion was during my introductory speech.

I realized later that I didn't even allow myself to feel angry about what happened until after everything was over. (I think the others might have done something similar. Our collective anger definitely peaked in our private group meeting that evening.) That was a significant realization, and I better learn from it. You know, I spent months trying to learn about how race, class, and sexuality affect aggressors, and how oppression in all its forms fuels violence. I used nothing of that learning during our discussion, because those people didn't think those issues were important. That's worth being angry over.

We salvaged some things from the event. Like I said, we connected with someone whose work will help ours grow. And we talked to a couple of other people who really seemed interested in our discussion, and I hoped we allowed them to take something from it.

Also, one of the presenters from the session I went to on Saturday morning showed up at our roundtable. I talked to him afterwards about his paper, and will hopefully get a copy when he finishes the final version.

Small steps toward progress. I'm taking what I can from the experience. Ultimately, I'm glad we went to Cincinnati, and I'm glad we did this. I do plan to give it another go, though it maybe in a different forum than NWSA.