This is a personal anecdote about the pervasiveness of white hegemonic masculinity; the intersection of masculinity with race; and coming to terms with my own white privilege.

In the ninth grade, I became aware of a simple but highly frustrating fact about hallway traffic: even when it comes to walking, patriarchy dictates who gets out of the way and who does not. As a small, very skinny fourteen-year-old girl, my experience of getting from one class to another involved a lot of ducking and dodging, sometimes what felt like diving, to avoid bumping into other people–collisions I always felt responsible for. The boys in my hallways, however, did not move. For anyone.

This asymmetry became a central metaphor for sex-based oppression for me. It represented so much of what I felt was wrong with society. Boys were (are) raised entitled to things, including space; girls were (are) raised as subordinates who did not have the same rights to things that they in fact share with boys, including space. As a girl, I had accordingly been socialized to intrude upon other people’s space as little as possible, even when it was simply me existing as a body in a cramped corridor. It was a perfect example of the inequality everyone seemed to be denying existed, and I was rather furious. So, in retaliation, I decided to stop moving for people. I was so excited to challenge a small but fundamental way in which boys held privilege over girls.

This was so difficult. I mean wow. The first time I tried to let myself bump into someone, I moved completely out of their way. The same thing happened probably ten times in a row. When I finally did get the courage to walk in a straight line, I was able to discover several more things about patriarchy and masculinity that I would not have expected.

The first was that when I did not move out of their way, people would run straight into me–and be genuinely surprised. The reaction I got from almost every boy I tried this with was one of “oh sorry,” with an inflection that really said “oh sorry, I didn’t see you there.” While I was pleased with the fact that they did not get angry with me, I also could not help but notice that I was practically invisible to them beforehand.

The second was that I could actually get boys to move out of my way, but only when I performed a certain level of masculinity. I needed to stand up tall and make myself big. I puffed my chest a little. I walked with my arms by my sides, and I made unwavering eye contact with the people I was on track to hit. The most difficult part was not ever changing my direction or speed. Only when I projected this manly kind of confidence, and only after a couple strides did most boys start to make room for me. The success of getting someone to accommodate my presence in a hallway was tainted by the fact that I had to walk “like a man” to do so–a clear manifestation of masculinity’s primacy in American society.

The third was that it was a considerable challenge to challenge gender norms, even when I was trying to combat a dynamic that I perceived as disadvantageous to me. When I first tried to just walk in a straight line, I encountered a lot of internal resistance. Then, when I performed masculine behaviors to get people to move for me, it was flat-out tiring. This experiment was a perfect example of the need to both challenge the hierarchy I saw in the world and the hierarchy that persisted within.

I have also come to view both this project of mine as a manifestation of my privilege, white and otherwise. Beth Richie describes the oppression black, lower-class women experience in the United States using a spectrum of different types of violence. Physical violence, at the most extreme end of the spectrum, includes assaults, murders, and the horrible like. In the middle of the spectrum sits sexual violence. Of course, there is a great deal of overlap between the categories of “physical” and “sexual” violence (hence the term “spectrum”). The last type of violence is symbolic: social discourse that marginalizes, tokenizes, dehumanizes, and misrepresents black women, especially those with low socioeconomic status (Richie 2012). I interpret this “metaphor” of women making way for men as, while impractical, a mostly symbolic form of oppression. As a white, middle-class, cis, hetero, able-bodied girl, I was able to focus on a gender problem that amounted to an inconvenience. As Crenshaw would put it, my head brushes the basement ceiling (Crenshaw 1989).

Continuing my experiment also helped me realize the racial dimensions of patriarchy. When I prepared to walk in straight lines passed all men, I quickly noticed that I was already walking in straight lines passed men–all people–of color. It was only white men who did not move for me. It then became shockingly apparent that I only experienced oppression in one dimension. Furthermore, while it was normal for a white man to take up a lot of space and to expect others to move for him, these embodiments of masculinity are not available, or at least as available, to men of color. I saw these limitations because of my white privilege, because men of color would not be given the option to exercise the same kind of masculinity as white men in a white supremacist system. Obviously, when it comes to challenging hegemony, I am better off challenging white men’s embodiments of masculinity and challenging my own white privilege.

I now move through my daily life with two goals. One is to *not* move for white men, and one is *to* move for all people of color. The latter of these can be difficult because many people of color are (unconsciously or otherwise) proactive about letting a white person go first. I am regardless very interested in continuing to subvert normal patterns of movement in an effort to subvert white hegemonic masculinity.

References

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 136-167. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf.

Richie, B. (2012). Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York University Press.