My passion for political science has been understood through the lens of people that I saw myself in, learning from a diverse array of political theorists, authors, and thinkers. These people were typically women, such as Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Ardent, who are radical, paradigm shifting, and political women who redefined their respective eras. Yet, upon formally studying political science at Mt. A, I noticed a common thread weaved throughout my humanities classes. That women in general, were reduced to a one sentence glyph and a 50-minute class, that is, if they were included at all. I saw women were being reduced to a one-week syllabus special, and typically, there was no mention of female political theorists. If modern liberal arts institutions want to champion developing progressive, inclusive, educations that are meant to be challenging, why are women participants relegated to less than a sentence?
Within this context, women are framed to seem like inactive participants in politics, who have nothing to contribute rather than being the other sex. This is fundamentally untrue and perpetuates harmful narratives about how politics should look and feel. Learning outside of a professional setting through a personal curriculum composed of diverse theorists has given me a diverse, complex, and critical perspective on how I see and interpret politics— however, these benefits have yet to be translated into the classroom. There is just no room given to women to be autonomous, active, thinkers and participants within the social sciences, especially politics. How can we claim that we are truly teaching in an interdisciplinary context when women are relegated to the corner? There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we teach political science— female political scientists, historians, and philosophers should not be relegated to their own gender-studies themed course, but included within the larger political context where they have always existed and should belong. Women must be understood as active, autonomous people who exist in historical and political spaces outside of men.
Joan W. Scott said in her paper, Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis in 1986 that within the studies of history and political science, “war, diplomacy, and high politics have not been explicitly about [gendered] relationships, [so] gender seems not to apply and so continues to be irrelevant to the thinking of historians concerned with issues of politics and power. The effect [of this thinking] is to endorse a certain functionalist view ultimately rooted in biology and to perpetuate the idea of separate spheres” (Scott, 1057). Although Scott’s account is decades old, it still rings true within modern contexts. Women are consistently relegated to ‘gendered’ politics, where there is no integration into the mainstream. The curse of being a female theorist is just that, you will always be regarded as your sex before your work. The space that exists for you is labeled as gendered, or feminist, although there is no explicit correlation between any academic women’s work to being inherently feminist other than the fact that the author is a woman. There is no inherent respect that stems from being a woman, as there is for men. Hence, we are continually put aside to let male theorists dominate the political subject.
Women of colour, like myself, have politics that look like them. Everyone exists within society in an intersectional context, where the nuances of race, sex, class, and sexuality all come together to form an agent’s socio-political understanding. I am not able to detach myself from the objective realities that politics and governance has created for me. This is how I have come to understand politics. If liberal arts institutions desire to grow their political science programs, it cannot be afraid of including women on a level that is equitable to their male counterparts. The only classes which made spaces for women as active agents of their subject were taught by female professors. These classes can typically be framed to have a predominant theme of gender and its intersection with the social sciences, rather than a generalized course. Should we have to rely on typically non-male professors going out of their way to make a space where female and other gender-diverse voices can be heard? Rather, women should be included within the humanities, especially in political spaces, with respect, nuance, and in a manner which does not victimize them.
