Another View of Exclusion

SC

"This place we share is a light--that safety zone. When you live in a society that is organized against your very existence, you need someplace where you can come and be who you are."
---Bernice Johnson Reagan, MWMF 2003

Women's media have long been one of the rare outlets through which women can speak for themselves and create a space separate from male dominance and oppression. Since the start of the women's media movement during the 1960s, women have gathered their resources to create print periodicals, Internet periodicals, film and theater groups, as well as music festivals. Music festivals run by and for women, featuring women performers, have most certainly been a critical way for women to get their music and collective voices into the ears, minds, souls and lives of more people. Women's music festivals-as is true of most women-owned and run media-are more than just entertainment or profit-filled endeavors. They are agents of social, political and artistic change and they are acts of resistance against the mainstream media's exclusion and marginalization of women's voices and perspectives. The irony, unfortunately, is that now one of the most successful and oldest women's music festival in the United States--the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival--is the target of boycotts and accusations because of its women-only policies.

In 1975 the first Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was held. According to a review by Cesca Waterfield about the documentary film Radical Harmonies ("Woodstock meets women's liberation in a film about a movement that exploded the gender barriers in music"), the Michigan festival "began with a borrowed ditto machine for publicity, determination to circumvent a male-dominated industry and a common desire to nurture solidarity among women while having a good time."

Since then, the festival has become an amazing event in which women from across the U.S. come together for a week to listen to great music, participate in intensive workshops, make cool crafts and meet new friends. But that is not the only goal organizers hope to accomplish every year. As the festival web site states: "For nearly three decades, Michigan has been a home base for the womyn's community to discover and build a womon-identified culture. Womyn handle everything from stage work to plumbing to cooking for thousands, creating an annual antidote to the larger culture that denies womyn's abilities, ethics, good sense and good times. We manifest our reality of a true counterculture, one where we create a world devoted to social justice, where womyn do the work, have big fun and rock on. For one week we celebrate the diversity, strength and beauty of womyn."

The purpose of the Michigan festival is to create feminist space safe from patriarchal oppression and rape culture. The intentions of the festival are important, completely valid and quite inspirational. However, in the past few years some people have begun boycotting the festival and condemning the exclusionary element of the festival-attempting to either force festival organizers to allow admittance for anyone who wishes to attend or to make this year's festival the last.
The controversy surrounding the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival began in 1999 when it was discovered that transsexuals were in attendance; an individual with a penis disrobed in the communal showers where other women were also showering or preparing to do so. This was interpreted as a very threatening and disrespectful act by the other women present, who expected to be in women-only space and were rightly fearful when suddenly confronted with an unclothed unknown person with male genitalia. When women travel to the Michigan festival they expect for only those few days to feel completely safe from the threat of male violence. One week a year is quite possibly the lowest demand a woman can make. But apparently, some feel it is still asking too much. There is so little women-only space as it is, yet some members of the trans community feel that their movement is the most important issue and what little space women have carved out for themselves should be available for their use. In her article, Karla Mantilla (see "The Stealth Politics of Transgender" on this site) asks an important question as she says, "Clearly, trans people (like all people) deserve basic human rights... but do [transpeople], at any stage of transition, have the right to be at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival?"

Exclusion is exclusion. At least that's what boycotters or those angered over the festival's women-only policies argue. Maybe that's true. And in that case, exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the major traps that people in privilege fall into is not realizing that sometimes they will have to be excluded from certain groups, conversations and spaces. Exclusion is sometimes necessary to prevent the erasure of the specificity of difference. We all know that gender is a social construction; however, gender constructs are very real in that people are oppressed through them. Men and women are most definitely socialized differently in the U.S. (as in most cultures). This is not to deny the experiences and struggles of individuals who were born biologically male but feel they belong in a woman's body or would rather be emulating female characteristics (whatever that means)-rather it is to also recognize that just because a biological male identifies as a woman, sympathizes with women's issues and presents her/himself to look more like a woman, that does not mean that s/he has been socialized or treated as a woman by the rest of society. It does not mean that s/he has not experienced years of male privilege. For instance, does a biological male who has lived 40, 30 or even 20 years in a male body know what it is like to fear male violence on a daily basis as most women do? As Mantilla says, "Acting as if male socialization is not intimately linked to power relations and deeply rooted even in those who wish to eschew it, is a smokescreen for conservative forces in the guise of radicalism to destroy the few vestiges of feminist space that we have." Changing one's appearance and body does not change one's gender, nor does it confront and renegotiate deeply-rooted power relations. Gender resides not only in our heads, but in how we see and treat others and how we are viewed and treated in return. Condemning the women-only policies of the Michigan festival is a manipulative act of co-optation as men force attention to their issues and divert attention away from challenges to patriarchy.

Many feminists feel that they have a commitment to feminism to not silence anyone who feels the need to vocalize his or her issues and concerns. But the struggles and successes of the women's movement have taught us that gender-exclusive spaces can be empowering spaces in which women come together to heal and gain strength from one another. Sometimes an individual's presence is inappropriate. Those who support the women-only policies of the Michigan festival realize that feminists and activists do not have to create a binary in which exclusiveness is either always good or always bad-there is a time and place when sometimes being exclusive is important for the purpose of retaining particular values and objectives. When exclusivity is used it is important to then ask whose voices are not being heard and who is not present and what does this mean? In terms of the Michigan festival, it means that women who attend the week-long festival can have the unique experience of being safe from male violence while living in a women's community where their strength and diversity are celebrated. And as Mantilla says, "We'll have inclusion when we live in post-patriarchy."

In all this discussion of exclusion versus inclusion, let's not forget that the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is also an amazing musical event that features female musicians performing folk, bluegrass, rock, punk, gospel, rap, dance and spoken word. Through the festival, participants and performers understand more clearly the power of their voices and music, and experience a media outlet and communication network in which all can take part.