“Listen to Her and Really Value Her”
An Interview with Claudia Norton
ROWE CENTER: What has been your personal journey that brought you to feminism, and how do you think that journey affects your vision of how feminism might develop over the next four decades?
CLAUDIA NORTON: I’m 23 years old, and my personal journey has been developing through my whole life in different forms — I grew up in a household where my mom was the main breadwinner and my dad was the caretaker, so I had models of gender roles that were different from the mainstream. But I wasn’t political in high school. When I went to college at Brown University, I participated in a peer-run women-centered sex education workshop; we talked about birth and abortion, body image, boundaries, communication, gender and sexuality — it was a full-spectrum understanding of female sexuality issues, but also through the lens of social justice and structural oppression, of how class might affect our perception of bodies or sexual choices. All these topics seem disparate, but they’re affected by power, specifically gender power as well as race and class power. So getting to see all those issues through those lenses was earth-shattering for me — I know what having a period is, yeah, but what about a period through the lens of race? I saw my racial and class privilege in a more holistic view, and that was very important for my development. Coming into a political consciousness really got me excited. I started facilitating workshops; it’s what got me interested in feminism.
When I began to understand systems of sexism, racism, class, and bodily ability I changed, and I also developed strong relationships with other people in the journey of learning about these things, and it kept me thinking and kept pushing me. If I just read a book with information about politics or systemic sexism I wouldn’t be as touched or motivated. So providing that kind of personal experience became a vocation of sorts — if I had that kind of transformation through understanding myself in a larger context, it would be useful and powerful to share that with other people.
I started teaching sex education at a high school in Rhode Island, and then I moved to New Orleans because I wanted to complicate my understanding of things; it was really different because I was in a solitary period and I didn’t have a community of activists to check in with. I moved back to Rhode Island and got a call from Eli Schmitt asking if I would help vision a new program for Rowe. Automatically I said yes, and a year-and-a-half later Skill Set came out of it.
Over the next four decades, between 2014 and 2054, the strategy I’m doing now and that Skill Set is doing and that I’ve seen start to work is interactive, transformative, personal experiences — and so for the next 40 years, that’s as far as I can say. All strategies need to happen, everything that’s happening to keep pushing the movement forward, but for me, that’s what I’m equipped to do.
The feminism I hope to see in 40 years will be a feminism that works to end a system of domination across race and class stratification, and is well-adapted to the needs of people without systemic power. I also hope to see a trend of white people organizing in their own communities and being accountable to people of color rather than assuming what others need.
R.C.: What do you see as some of the biggest issues over the next 40 years?
C.N.: A few weeks ago I asked my friend Raillan what he thought a powerful frame for thinking about interventions in oppressive trends might be and he said that to him sexism and homophobia came from the same place. He said something like, “I think the issue with sexism and homophobia is that certain bodies are valued above other bodies.” I agree and think that a big issue, in the most general sense, is that cis-gender straight white men’s bodies are valued over women’s bodies, over queer bodies, over trans bodies. It’s the root of sexism, and it plays out in rape culture, in health care, in access to abortion or choice for women, in hate crimes. You can trace it back. You can see the firing of trans and LGBT employees because of their identities as based on that understanding that some bodies are valued more than others. This seems to be the underlying issue that we’ll be working with in feminism. The same system underlies those oppressions, and underneath that is capitalism, which doesn’t take into account the value of all people, especially those that don’t have a high position in the system.
My hope in thinking about feminism four decades into the future is that because everyone has a role in oppression and everyone has role to play — which is something I learned from Pippi Kessler. Even if you’re a cis-identified white male you have a role to play. That’s something I’m looking forward to in our conference at Rowe for January, the inclusion of men and cis-men and the shift in frame that allows us to see that other people are not the problem; systems of domination are the problem, and we are all involved, and we can all work together to end them.
R.C.: Forty years from now you’ll be 63 years old — what do you think you’d want to say to a 23-year-old in the year 2054?
C.N.: Something that changed my understanding of feminism and activism and really fuelled me is that one of the Skill Set facilitators in the group, Daniella Polyak, was talking about how the rights that women have now had to be fought for, that we inherited the effects of people’s activist labor, that they’re hard-earned rights and the world wouldn’t be the one that I was born into if women hadn’t fought for the rights that I have now. Realizing how precarious my circumstances are motivated me to see how my advocacy could affect women and men in the future — because sexism hurts men, too, just as racism also hurts white people; it alienates us from each other. So having a 23-year-old in 2054 be able to hear that the current state of the world is the result of other people’s activism, that “this is what we did and you can do it, too,” that this is how communities are built and lives are changed, through authentic relationships. It’s personal and political, it’s intimacy and community engagement — how can we all work out in protest of someone’s mistreatment if we don’t have a relationship with that person? In talking to someone who’s 23, I’d also make it a very important point to listen to her. To just listen to her, and really value her.
Claudia Norton and Eli Schmitt will present their workshop “Young Feminist Activism: A Skill Set Retreat for People Under 30” on January 11–14.
CLAUDIA NORTON is a feminist, educator, and activist who has been involved with the anti-oppressive comprehensive sexual education workshop FemSex for the past five years. In early 2014, she worked on a team to organize workshops for the first annual Converge For Change conference at Brown University. Claudia also nannies for a young boy and produces books and sculptures that invite people to engage with institutions like sexism and consumerism.
ELI SCHMITT first came to Rowe Young People’s Camp in 1997. He has worked as Marketing Director for Ma’yan, a small educational nonprofit that works on youth empowerment with a feminist lens. He is a Grace Paley Organizing Fellow with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. He was one of the editors of n+1 Magazine’s OCCUPY! Gazette, an irregular periodical of writing about the Occupy movement.
