Read on Twitter
Someone asked me what the response had been to the man that asked me this question, but in the particular incident I was thinking about when I wrote this tweet it was a woman that had made the assumption that I was my colleague’s wife. A short thread: https://twitter.com/grace_emmett/status/1354465593034997771
2/ We can sometimes act as if sexism is something that men do to women, as if women are immune from absorbing dominant gender narratives which assume that to be masculine is the norm.
3/ This ‘default male’ thinking is everywhere, as Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women impressively demonstrates, manifesting itself in everything from urban planning to medical studies.
4/ In the context of SBL, this expresses itself in the unwritten assumption that a member/conference attendee is male (and, more often that not, white, able-bodied, Christian etc).
5/ So even though this woman was herself at the conference, this gendered script that shapes the culture of SBL was still playing out in her interactions with other women.
6/ I’m not really meaning to critique her specifically here, because this is something we can all do inadvertently. The point is that default-male thinking is deeply embedded in our culture and something that we all have to work to resist.
7/ Reflecting on this, though, reminded me that the worst experience of sexism I ever had as a PhD student was instigated by another woman.
8/ It’s taken me a while to process that incident, and while that’s partly due to the nature of what happened, it’s also, I’m sure, connected to the fact that when it happened it was hard for me to recognise the encounter as misogynistic.
9/ As Hindy Najman puts it in her essay on women’s support (or lack thereof) for others in the academy, ‘We need to watch the behaviour of women against women, even by those who write treatises against sexism. We are all vulnerable and we are all capable of acts of violence’.
10/ (Here's the link to the essay: https://www.academia.edu/37985162/Community_and_Solidarity_Women_in_the_Academy)
11/ Though in many ways not comparable, it’s the same myth that underpins both interactions: that there is a certain way to look and be in Biblical Studies (which extends beyond gender of course) and the sad truth is that women are capable of enacting this against other women.
12/ But there are, of course, many reasons to be hopeful too: there are so many men and women within our field who inspire me and model gracious inclusivity. Thankfully, they vastly outweigh the negative experiences I’ve had navigating the contours of academia.
