RG: MY name is doctor Rachel Alicia Griffin and I’m an assistant professor in the
department of speech communication at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
and for me being a professor in a speech comm department is a little different than
what I think folks might imagine. The area I’m that in is intercultural
communication, but even more particular, critical intercultural communication, so I
do a great deal of work with critical race theory, black feminist thought, black
masculinity, popular culture and of course, gender violence. So a lot of my work
really circles around ideas of power, privilege and voice, whether it’s through the
courses that I teach—for example, right now I’m teaching a black feminist course—
or if it’s through getting particular keynotes, or if it’s through the research that I’m
doing, it all definitely, you know, can be understood in relation to what according to
different dominant ideologies or different discourses considered, everything that’s
politically incorrect to talk about out loud and to challenge and to resist.
JP: My name’s Josh Phillips. Currently I’m a PhD student at Southern Illinois
University. My research interests in particular deal with issues of gender violence,
specifically about how men and men’s groups are trying to approach gender
violence and how men’s activism can really set up a model that is inclusive around
gender and sexual differences as opposed to reinstating or recentering patriarchal
influences. A lot of the work I do outside of the academy, I’m a national speaker, I
probably speak about five or six times a year around the country at schools about
gender violence and more specifically I talk about—in 2008, my self and two
colleagues of mine, we walked from Miami to Boston in order to raise awareness
about sexual violence and this walk took us three months and we met a lot of great
people along the way, we heard a lot of really inspiring stories, and when I got back I
finally went ahead and decided to sit down for a couple months and write down my
experiences into a book that’s titled 1800 Miles: Striving to End Sexual Violence One
Step at a Time. So now I try to use that book as a catalyst to illustrate to individuals
how I try to engage in activism on an everyday level and really hope to inspire
college students and community members to figure out their own little spaces, how
they can be involved in this issue, just on a daily basis. So yeah, I’m just really trying
to be encouraging to get folks involved on this issue, this small micro-everyday
reality that surrounds us.
KJ: I think it’s really interesting that you use pop culture to talk about gender
violence, could you try and give an overview of how that works for you both?
JP: I understand pop culture as this pedagogical tool that teaches all of us lessons
about sexual assault, domestic violence and really these sort of greater gender roles
that we’re asked to perform every day, and so as a teacher at a university and as a
person who goes out and teaches and gives these talks I try to situate pop culture as
this huge influence in our everyday lives, and so by better understanding pop
culture as a means to tell us how to perform these different gender roles, I think pop
culture is accessible to everyone, everyone can resonate with some aspect of pop
culture, and at the same time as we deconstruct pop culture, we can get a better
understanding of why we act in certain ways, why we behave in certain ways, how
we influence in certain ways, how we perpetuate certain stereotypes or prejudice or
gender roles, and the more that we can understand pop culture, we’ll have a better
understanding of how and why we treat different people in different ways in our
everyday interactions.
RG: For me, one of the things you had in your email was this idea of a feminist
response to pop culture, and I want to expand that a little bit, because I want to shift
that to feminists in the popular, not only responding to pop culture but also
deconstructing pop culture and challenging pop culture and using pop culture as a
pedagogical or a teaching tool, right? So, one of the things that I think about as
someone who teaches on a campus and is very much in the realm of undergraduate
students on a consistent basis, is not only US American society saturated with pop
culture, but because, in terms of my gender violence activism, most of it is campusbased, I see on a daily basis how saturated their lives are with popular culture, so to
approach pop culture from a critical intercultural or a critical feminist standpoint
for me means to absolutely recognize that pop culture is always more than just
entertainment. I know that from a student perspective is often the reaction that I get
when we start deconstructing pop culture and really looking to challenge and
critique and locate the –isms is “oh, my gosh, Rachel, or oh, my gosh Doctor Griffin,
it’s just a film, or it’s just a movie,” and my response is “it can be entertainment, but
it is far more than just entertainment.” So, not only is it pervasive, pop culture isn’t
entertainment and it isn’t innocent and it teaches things. For me, it’s not about
whether or not we decide to engage in pop culture, like do we decide to sit down
and read Cosmopolitan magazine, or do we decide to listen to hip-hop, do we decide
to listen to country music, do we decide to watch whatever the latest and greatest
hot show is, it’s not about if we decide to watch it or not, or if we decide to engage it
or not, or if we like it or don’t, it’s really about the complexity in that very moment of
how we are making those choices. So I always teach my students, and various
audiences when it comes to educating about pop culture that I’m not here to ask you
to not watch popular culture or not to play particular video games, I want you to
come to a point of consciousness about the choices that you are making, so why do
you like it, what role does it play in your life, what does it teach you about who you
are and what does it teach you about who other people, so for me it is all about
getting to that conscious space where we can engage in pop culture, mindful of the
influence it is having. I want us to actively engage with pop culture, so I’m okay with
the omnipresence of pop culture, I just want active, conscious engagement.
KJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s not like pop culture is going away.
RG: Precisely, and when I first heard the Roots of Change call, I have to tell you I was
ecstatic, like fall-out-of-my-seat oh-my-gosh ecstatic, because oftentimes, in terms of
anti-gender-violence advocacy, we get really, from my perspective, pigeonholed into
conversations about prevention and education, and when I say pigeonholed I don’t
mean that those two things aren’t important—prevention and education are
crucial—but from my point we’ve got to expand what prevention and education
look like in a society that’s media-saturated, particularly once we start to position
pop culture as pedagogical and far more than entertainment, then we really crack
open into that rich space of like “gosh, how do our students learn about gender
norms, right? And how do our students learn about sex and sexuality and consent
and all of these issues that are so closely tied to gender violence?” So, I was thrilled
because having an entire conference focused on pop culture and media is very
much, I think it’s necessary and it’s been long in coming, so I hope that we start to
see that kind of trend in different places, or at least spaces in the preexisting
conferences that might focus on institutions other than media, where media is
welcome to be brought into that conversation as both a site where gender violence
can be reproduced or some of the norms that support gender violence can be
reproduced, but I would also love to see us doing more things like this, creating a
podcast, where we can use different forms of pop culture and social media to resist
gender violence.
KJ: And, because you engage with men and boys, I assume, are there certain, what,
as far as pop culture do you use uniquely when speaking to men about gender
violence?
JP: There’s a group that I’m involved with on my own campus at Southern Illinois
University known as Progressive Masculinity Mentors, is sort of set apart from other
men’s groups that I’ve been involved with. This group doesn’t try to—it’s not a topdown approach, it’s very grass-roots, it very much allows every member within the
organization to bring in their own pop culture critiques and to bring in their own
criticism of pop culture. So, we’ll talk about everything from sports to hip-hop music
to things that we read in the newspapers, there’s a very diverse range of opinions.
So you have individuals who have never been engaged in dialogue about gender
violence before, but they’re really into football or they’re really into basketball, and
we can have conversations about sports, we can slowly introduce them in the ways
in which gender is performed on the field, we can slowly introduce them in the ways
gender is reproduced in music and lyrics, but we really try to meet men where
they’re at, and where we find men at is in these various stereotype positions. We
find men want to talk about sports, we find men that want to talk about music,
specifically hip-hop and rap music, the guys that I try to engage with on an everyday
basis, and so just meeting guys who are there and understanding that they have
these outlets and these outlets are their educational experience, I think that that
does a lot as opposed to trying and going and just from a top-down approach and
trying to get guys to understand these big concepts, these big academic or scholarly
terms, even using the words ‘feminism’ or ‘feminist criticism,’ that can sometimes
wash over men in ways they can’t comprehend, they don’t understand the way that
makes them marginalized. So, just going in and allowing them to have these organic
conversations about the ways in which they see gender perform in their everyday
realities and near the end starting to dig a little bit deeper and starting some critical
dialogues about what it means to be a man in some instances I think is really, really
helpful.
KJ: As someone who’s really in the field of gender violence and education, Rachel,
you mentioned that a lot of people don’t talk about pop culture and media and I’m
wondering what else you see lacking and missing from more of the mainstream
conversation.
RG: Oh, goodness. For me, the first thing that comes to mind that is both related to
pop culture and I think equally is important is this concept of intersectionality. I
think that intersectionality, coming out of Kimberly Crenshaw, who’s a critical race
theorist scholar, and also coming very much out of second-wave feminism, right, so
like Gloria Anzaldua and Audre Lorde and bell hooks, they’ve been talking about
intersectionality for quite some time. I think we’ve gotten better at including the
word intersectionality. It’s at least in our everyday conversations for the most part,
at the ground level around prevention and education, but I don’t know that we’ve
gotten to the point where we embody an idea of intersectionality when it comes to
anti-gender violence activism, and what I mean by that is that not just mentioning
intersections of identity such as gender, race, sexual orientation, class, ability, age,
size and so forth are significant, I think that we have to take it a step further and
really push ourselves to be reflexive around this idea that not only do the
intersections of our identities matter in how we reach out to survivors and how we
resist cultural norms that fuel gender violence, but we also have to build the
intersections into things like brochures and programs and we have to consider
intersectionality when we look at the advocacy groups that we’re building and when
we look at the different communities that we’re trying to reach into and access. So
while I think it’s being mentioned and talked about, which is a very important shift, I
would love to see on a much more wide-scale level, it being implemented, built into
the ways that we move through activism and this movement.
KJ: Do you have an example of where you see that either working really well, of a
group or a person who’s doing that well?
RG: You know, just last week, in Baltimore, I spoke at the Women of Color
conference for MCASA, which is the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and
just the fact alone that they have a women of color network conference, that title I
think says something for me, and it’s designed around talking about the
intersections of race and gender in relation to gender violence. Spaces like that I
think are crucial, and not just in terms of race and gender, I think we need to do, you
know, we need multiple combinations, we can’t account for all intersections at any
given moment, like, there’s no way to build in absolutely every intersection to every
panel, ever program, every keynote, so on and so forth, but what we can do is make
sure that we’re being attentive to particular intersections explicit and also being
accountable to why it is that we’re not engaging in other intersections explicitly, and
then to do some, I like to think about it as checking in on what intersections really
well. Like, I’ll use myself as an example: I do race, gender class and sexual
orientation, fairly well, realizing that I’m always in progress, always learning more
about my own social consciousness, so I don’t want to claim perfection, like “oh my
gosh, I’ve got the intersections of these things well,” but even more transparent, I do
race and gender much better than I do race, gender and class or race, gender and
sexual orientation or all four taken together, but that also tells me I have to work
really hard to be inclusive around religion and nationality and ability and so on and
so forth, right? Just being transparent about what are we doing well and maybe
what are we not doing well, to make sure that as people involved and the advocacy
in our everyday lives that we’re also being accountable in the way that we ask our
audiences to be accountable.
KJ: Well, I know you do this session and you’re going to do this session at the
upcoming Roots of Change called “Love the Way You Lie,” about the Rihanna song
that came out last summer. Are there other pop culture or media stories or tropes
out there right now that you also think provide a compelling take on gender
violence?
RG: When “Love the Way You Lie” came out, I was mortified. I want to be
transparent about that—my initial reaction was like jaw-to-the-floor you’ve-got-tobe-kidding-me because the co-authored piece that Josh and I have, we critique it
pretty heavily in the way that it reproduces norms that reproduce men’s violence
against women and market it as something that is acceptable. So, we do a very
critical critique of this song. Now, the song does have, I think, progressive potential.
I mean, even just the fact that the song puts on a grand mediated scale, gender
violence out into public discourse is a topic for conversation. I think in the positive
because in that moment it can be utilized as a teaching tool. Another song that I
think is important to pay attention to that is also a recent song is housed more so in
the realm of country and that’s “Sugarland Stuck Like Glue,” which I read from a
critical standpoint as a music video that reproduces norms around stalking is
acceptable, and also raises really interesting discussion points, because in the video,
the person stalking is a female and the person being stalked is a male. The imagery
you see, you see a woman watching a male, outside what you can interpret is his
home, and then she kidnaps him, and then she ties him, and then she pours alcohol
down his throat. When this is going on, the song itself I would describe as being very
upbeat, and in the music video, the female is doing it with what I interpret as humor,
right? Like, this is funny, this is fun, I’m in love with you, I’m stuck like glue.
JP: And one thing I thought was interesting about this “Sugarland” song in contrast
with the Eminem-Rihanna song is that it does have this idea of stalking, of violence,
of sort of forcing one person into a romantic relationship that he or she may not
want to be involved with, but what it does is that it trivializes the stalking incident
because it reverses the gender norms that we’re commonly taught to think about
stalking. One thing that I’m really fascinated with is the ways in which the gender
roles are reversed, and if the men is the victim of the stalking incident, it’s seen as
comical, it’s seen as buffoonery, it’s seen as absurd when really those incidents can
be just as detrimental, so now what I’m doing right now with some of my research is
I’m trying to look at pop culture and the ways in which that men who are survivors
of domestic violence, of stalking, of sexual assault, the ways in which they are
treated in pop culture, so there experiences are often minimized, they’re often seen
as some sort of joke, as something to laugh at, because its something so abnormal,
because it’s something not talked about, but I think their voices, their pain really
gets marginalized, so we often need to recognize that men are also victims and
survivors of these horrific acts, and we need to start drawing attention to the ways
in which their struggles and their pain are also serious, so I think that “Sugarland”
song really kind of brings attention to the ways in which we want to poke fun at,
because of how absurd it might seem that a man be a victim of stalking, but when we
start to do that we really start to marginalize the everyday male experience of men
who might be victims of some sort of gender violence, and so I think it’s really
important to start looking into these incididences in order to see how male
survivors of gender violence are processing through these experiences, and how
their voices might be taken more seriously.
KJ: Are there any promising or progressive sort of representation of men and gender
violence that you see in popular media right now?
JP: Yes? Uh, give me a second to think of a few. I mean, nothing immediately pops
into mind, which might be very, very telling, but I do think, I mean we have these
moments in pop culture, right, where every once in a while something will emerge
that we see as progressive, so I’m thinking about a few years back, this reference to
the Ludacris song, the “Runaway Song” where Ludacris kind of makes his ode to
women, about women being abused, and how he wants women to kind of run away
into his protection, etc, etc, I know Lil Wayne has a new song out that calls attention
to domestic violence. I’m thinking about Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls that’s
problematic in a couple of ways, but it’s one of the very few representations we have
in pop culture that draws attention to sexual assault and domestic violence
specifically among African American women. So, I do think there are these sort of
hints among pop culture that kind of rise up every couple of years and really bring
attention to the suffering of marginalized voices, of women and even more
specifically women of color.
RG: Another recent example, and I struggle getting through this example too, but the
artist Lil Wayne released a song called “How to Love.” So, I read Lil Wayne critically
as problematic in terms of the ways that through his music I interpret him
reproducing sexism but also colorism which as to do with the politics of light
skinned versus dark skinned women. I feel like a great deal of Lil Wayne’s music
reproduces dominant ideologies around race, around gender and so forth. Now,
“How to Love,” oh my gosh, to be transparent, it completely took me off guard, right?
Because, I interpret “How to Love” as being a progressive representation of gender
violence in a number of different ways. I think that we can argue that it reproduces
norms about gender violence as well, but I want to mark the ways that I think that it
can be interpreted as progressive. You have a black male hip hop artist talking about
experiences with gender violence that black women have, over the course of a
lifespan. So, if you watch the film, you can see imagery or interpret imagery of
domestic violence, of sexual violence, of a black woman who’s contracted HIV, of a
abortions, so a number of different issues related to gender and sexuality that black
women encounter throughout their lives as women of color. It really tells the
narrative across generations, where it begins in a very difficult place, around a black
woman deciding not to have an abortion, and in that moment you can interpret that
this black woman being pregnant is not from her perspective, good news, all the way
through the end, generations later, a black woman being pregnant being a point of
celebration, so it tells a very different story about how to love, and how love looks
and how love can happen, and I struggle because I don’t want to say Lil Wayne is
now progressive, but I do want to say that we have an example of a black male artist
who, from my interpretation, has created a pedagogical tool in pop culture that can
be used to raise consciousness about gender violence, particularly at the
intersections of race, gender and many ways class.
KJ: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, because I think a lot of times when people
are talking about social justice in pop culture, people think it either has to be “good”
or “bad” pop culture, that it’s very cut and dry, but I think it’s both things can be a
sign of progression and problematic.
RG: Sure, and I also want to say, I think that’s one of the spaces where I find the most
help in helping students critique pop culture, is not taking a good/bad approach, but
taking a both/and, like “how can we read the text critically, in terms of how it
reproduces dominant ideologies and dominant stereotypes, and how it resists
dominant ideologies and dominant stereotypes. For example, right now I’m teaching
a class on Disney, and Disney animated film, and what we’re doing in there, is we
literally go film-by-film or text-by-text and talk about how does Disney reproduce
dominant ideologies, and how does Disney contest dominant ideologies. Disney is
one of the harder things to have students critique oftentimes, because the students
have grown up with it and they just simply love it, myself included. But, going
through that both/and door has been far more, from my perspective, more
productive than going through the either/or door, especially when we’re talking
about pop culture, if we’re talking about recent pop culture, we’re probably talking
about things students absolutely love, or absolutely identify with, which makes the
both/and much more productive than the either/or, because then it can become
about critiquing the pop culture, opposed to you know, swearing it off. For some
folks, that might be the answer that they come to, like, I just can’t engage with this
pop culture anymore now that I understand what I’m both implicitly and explicitly
supporting. For other folks, not engaging with a particular form of pop culture isn’t
an option because they so strongly identify with it, so there has to be an option for
folks who perhaps don’t perceive not engaging as a choice, and the choice that you
can offer through both/and is “engage and deconstruct, engage and be conscious.”
KJ: Well, one thing that I’m interested in is on your website, you advocate that just
because one doesn’t have the answers doesn’t mean you should be indifferent, so
could you talk a little bit about that, and how sometimes it’s just not good enough to
be passive about something and about how to sort of go back to meeting people
where they’re at? How do you talk to people who maybe don’t see themselves as
gender violence advocates?
JP: Well, I think a few stories that I might share with individuals who don’t think of
themselves as advocates or don’t think that they have some sort of role to play,
specifically men who say this issue doesn’t affect me, or I don’t know anyone etc. etc.
One story that I always bring forth to them is that I was involved with this issue for
five years and finally, when I was about 24 and 25, I went back home, I was hanging
out with some friends from high school, and a really good friend of mine from high
school came up to me and said “hey, Josh, I know this is what you’re doing now, and
I really wanted to tell you this tragic story where relationship abuse was going on
while we were in high school,” and in the back of my head I was thinking “why didn’t
you tell me in high school, we were such good friends etc. etc.,” and I keep coming
back to this moment of this individual felt so silenced because of the way she felt she
was going to be perceived, the way that she felt her friends were going to talk about
her, and she didn’t feel safe because of this cultural climate we created in order to
silence victims of violence. And so, I try to tell men that no matter where you think
you are on this issue, no matter how well you might think you know the women
specifically in your lives, there are going to be women in your own lives who are
going to be survivors or who are going through some violent relationship, and they
might not tell you anything at all. It took my five years to be engrossed in this issue
and finally a friend of mine came up, who I’ve been great friends with for a long
time, and told me her story, so what I tell men is that because we are surrounded by
so many people in our lives it’s important for us to continually do the work, and that
doesn’t mean your going to have a ton of men coming to your door trying to tell you
their stories, but it does mean if you continue to put yourself out there, you are
going to continually showcase yourself as this progressive man who’s trying to
model change and who’s trying to give the world a different view about what
masculinity can mean, and the more you can do that, the more comfortable of an
environment and a culture you are going to create in order for survivors of gender
violence to come forward and to share their stories. So you might not hear a story
the first year that you’re engaged with it, or the first five years that you’re engaged
with it, but as long as you’re going to help create culture that elicits some sort of safe
space where survivors feel like they can come forward and feel like they are going to
be listened to and feel as if they are going to be believed, then you’re doing your
part.
KJ: Yeah, about audiences being accountable, do you have any advice for people who
maybe don’t consider themselves advocates but do feel like they need to do
something about gender violence and how they can begin to work about these
different levels of accountability?
RG: I think it has to do with where individual people are in relation to their own
consciousness. One of the hardest things that I struggled to learn initially and still
grapple with on a regular basis is how to meet my audiences where they are, and
how to recognize the diversity that you’re going to encounter in any given room. Not
everyone is going to be open to this idea of activism. Not everyone is going to be
willing to identify as an advocate. Not everyone’s going to welcome this idea of
feminism or being a feminist, so for me, when I think about how to reach some of
those folks that are in different places around their own consciousness, I always try
to start in a place of humility and do some thinking about where was I before I
explicitly identified as an activist. Even though I do identify as an activist, where are
the spaces and places that my own privilege still prevents me from seeing different
realities? So one of the shifts that I try to get folks to make, particularly folks who
aren’t ready to engage in activism or mark themselves as a feminist or mark
themselves as somebody who’s resistant, is to simply make the shift between reality
to realities or from a possibility to possibilities, so this idea that there are more
perspectives in the world and more experiences in the world is then just your own,
and something that I try to teach is that, which is so much easier said than done for
myself included, is the idea that really arriving to a space of interaction or
conversation or dialogue with this idea that, and I’ll use myself as an example, that
my identities and values and ideologies and beliefs and experiences are just as
important as anyone else’s. And, oftentimes I feel that to be an effective entry point
for folks perhaps not necessarily to join in the movement against gender violence,
but to at least recognize that it is valuable. There has to be an entry point, and we
know that entry points around guilt and shame, although guilt and shame around
privilege are very much part of the process of becoming conscious, but guilt and
shame in and of itself oftentimes isn’t a door that people are willing to walk through
to join into a movement, so for me that door that I try to create, and really this is a
boiled down version of it, when it comes to gender violence, you know, one of the
things that I ask folks to consider in terms of survivors and for example accusations
of false reporting, I don’t go the route of you’re absolutely wrong for thinking that a
survivor might be making a false report, or might be lying, like for me, that’s
absolutely wrong to do, but for another person, that reaction might make sense in
their world, so instead of telling them that they’re wrong, on that right/wrong
binary, I ask them to imagine if they are wrong, to crack open the possibilities of
around what truth might look like, like you’re applying your idea of gender violence
to someone else’s situation, and then I ask them to consider is it worth the risk of
being wrong, so we can lay out this idea of false reporting, and the way that false
reporting is really amplified in the media as one of the most likely things that a
survivor of sexual assault is doing when they’re coming forward, and I ask them to
consider what if their perception of this event isn’t the only perception, especially
since you’re not directly involved, right? And you’re just kind of getting these
impressions through the media, which is oftentimes the ways that folks learn about
particular cases or gender violence, if they don’t have a, fortunately, an intimate
understanding of it, just getting folks to consider that maybe, just maybe, there’s a
different perspective of what happened. What if the other person’s perspective is
just as valid as your own? Particularly if they identify as a survivor.
JP: One thin that I try to constantly bring to the forefront is that the biggest thing for
me and the biggest thing that I found of usefulness to individuals when I go and I
speak is really trying to engage with something meaningful on an everyday level.
Rachel and I are going to go this Roots of Change conference and one conference
isn’t going to end gender violence. Me speaking at one school isn’t going to end
gender violence. If somebody reads my book, just reading my book isn’t going to end
gender violence, and so what I’m a huge advocate of is for individuals to find one
way every day to support their local activist, to support their local women’s center,
to educate themselves on just small parts of this issue every day, have conversations
with individuals in their classrooms, individuals in your community, just once
everyday, and if we can start to create this culture where it’s these everyday microrealities where we’re constantly having a constructive dialog about this issue, that is
really what’s going to bring about change, it’s not about big, huge speeches, it’s not
about keynotes, it’s not about best-selling books or really fancy websites, but it’s
bout when we can take all these resources and continually talk about them and
continually bring them up, and keep on circling around this idea of pop culture, pop
culture is so pervasive in our lives and the only way that we can combat some of
these misunderstandings about gender violence that happen through media and
happen through pop culture is if you constantly bring up realities of gender violence
in our everyday discussions, so we have to continue to offer this counternarrative
and this counterdiscourse to the pop culture misinformation if we hope to elicit
some sort of change, so for all of those individuals that are going to go the Roots of
Change conference, I am a big fan of networking and resourcing, but what is really
important is that when all of us leave that pop culture conference, what are going to
do on Monday morning, what are we going to do on Tuesday morning, how are we
going to take that information that we learned and how are we going to implement
it on an everyday basis and engage in dialog with our classmates, our colleagues and
our community members.