“To destroy systems of injustice. So the most marginalized among us have their voices heard. For the people we love to be able to take up space. To end violence against women — down to the last microaggression. To celebrate difference. For every woman, everyone who experiences intersections of oppression, to be liberated. This is why we need feminism.”

— Hannah Rose McShane, March 2016

Hannah Rose McShane is a senior in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program at Georgia State University in Atlanta and, not coincidentally, Hannah Rose McShane is also a radical feminist who hates men, denouncing males as “trash” and perpetrators of “oppression.” Ms. McShane expresses her delight in the “male tears” of “cishet white boys,” whom she resents for even daring to look at her. On her Instagram account, she boasts of “giving every guy looking at me a death glare.”

Ms. McShane here quotes from page 72 of Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, a 1990 book by the late Professor Sandra Lee Bartky (University of Illinois-Chicago). It is from Chapter 5 (“Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”), an essay that was originally published in a 1988 book, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by ecofeminists Irene Diamond (University of Oregon) and Lee Quinby (CUNY). Ms. McShane’s tweet somewhat truncates Professor Bartky’s words.

“In the regime of institutionalized heterosexuality,

woman must make herself ‘object and prey’ for the man . . .

Woman lives her body as seen by another,

by an anonymous patriarchal other.”

Read in context, Professor Bartky’s quote condemns heterosexuality as an oppressive “regime” in which every woman is “prey” of the “patriarchal other” (i.e., men) whose “gaze” is imposed on her “consciousness.”

Ms. McShane, who was hired last year as a student assistant in the WGSS department and honored this year as “Outstanding Student” in the program, identifies as “femme lesbian” (“I fall a little in love with every lesbian I meet.”) and says that her sexuality inspired her feminism, an emotional topic she discussed in a class assignment.

Boasting of her ability to attract “dykes,” and publicly emphasizing her dedication to her identity, Ms. McShane posed for Twitter selfies wearing a necklace with a lesbian symbol.

Ms. McShane’s “femme” lesbianism is evidently the subject of her senior thesis, and she is a critic of other feminists who, she says, are “reinforcing heteropatriarchy” by their mistreatment of lesbians.

The interim director of Georgia State’s Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is Professor Susan Talburt, whose scholarship includes Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education (2000) and Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education (2000). The director of WGSS undergraduate studies at GSU is Julie Kubala, who teaches about “dominant structures, such as capitalism, imperialism, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and of course, sexism,” and who describes her fields of study as “Lesbian and queer organizing and communities; feminist and queer theory; the impact of neoliberalism on public/private spheres; personal narrative; feminist pedagogy.” Another member of the WGSS “core faculty,” Megan Sinnott, is a specialist in “sexuality and gender in Thailand, specifically female same-sex relations and gendered identities.” Professor Sinnott is author of Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (2004). Another WGSS core faculty member at GSU, Tiffany King, describes her fields of study as, “Black gender and sexuality in the African Diaspora, Black Feminisms, Black Studies, Native Feminisms, critical geographies and settler colonialism.”

Left to right: Talburt, Kubala, Sinnott, King.

Such is the faculty of the department where “Outstanding Student” Hannah Rose McShane learns her lessons. She’s getting all A’s and planning to go to grad school and considers it “a work of art” to decorate her refrigerator with magnets spelling “F–k the Patriarchy.”

“This is why we need feminism,” Ms. McShane declares. She’s studying at a state university with an annual budget of $725 million, and obviously, she’s a victim of heteropatriarchal oppression.

Learning to live “that feminist witch life” — at taxpayer expense. Why do “people have a distorted perception of feminism”? Perhaps the Republicans who run the Georgia legislature should ask that question.







RELATED:

Feminists pay $50,000 a year to major in Gender Studies. Male oppressors invest in cat-food companies. Patriarchy wins.@KurtSchlichter — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 9, 2016

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