Acting Out: Gender Roles on Kalamazoo College's Campus

Frelon. Spring Quarter 2011. April the 28^th, 29^th, and 30^th. Thursday-Friday-Saturday nights. Each night Dalton Theatre filled to capacity; tickets for all nights sold out. A multitude of voices bounce around the large open space, making it hard to register even one’s own internal thought, let alone talk to a neighbor. The lights dim, spotlights draw the eye to center stage, and dancers appear. Men and women float, glide, slither, shimmy, stomp, and flaunt their way across the stage—in pairs, individually, in groups—to music drawn from a spectrum wide as the tastes of the participants. Pop music, world music, all kinds of music now fill the theatre, and the dancers move to it, now languidly, now laconically, now dramatically.

The dances fly by. The “Man Dance,” an off and on dance that has occurred throughout Frelon’s history, showcasing talented male dancers, begins. I did not attend this year’s Frelon, and thus I leave the specific telling of this dance to Ellen Smith, whose op-ed about the dance featured earlier this quarter in the Index.

The piece opened with a woman showing off her butt for an audience of other women judging her, as per the opening dialogue of “Baby Got Back.” Then the men came onstage, proclaiming their appreciation of big butts. The women left, only to walk seductively back onstage to catcalls and leers from the men as “What a Man” began.

As the music shifted to “I’m Too Sexy,” the women entered once again, this time crawling on the floor. To end the number the men stripped for and danced over the women, who were sitting on the stage with their legs spread open to the — standing and dominant — men.

The dance affected Ellen, a senior who has participated in the past three Frelon dances and describes herself as a “fairly active feminst leader,” intensely. “The way I read it […] it was reinforcing this idea of men as really dominant and sexually aggressive, and women as sexual objects,” she said. She went on to elaborate that the male stripping could have played with gender roles, but in the situation, where the women were in a lowered, vulnerable position, this didn’t come across to her.

Ellen went on to write her response, dated on the Index’s page to May 3^rd, which caused a stir on campus. In the Index, the web article received an unusually high number of comments, most of which basically said the issue being raised wasn’t a big deal, according to Ellen. A facebook note containing the op-ed was published by a current director of Frelon as an open forum for current and former directors to respond to it; at least one comment on the note was along the lines of “somebody needs to screw this girl so she’ll loosen up” and stop being so concerned, which “made me very uncomfortable,” said Smith. Ellen spoke out against what she perceived as “an astonishingly offensive display and reinforcement of problematic gendered power dynamics,” with emphasis on heteronormativity; in effect, a woman spoke out against the hierarchy and there were immediate attempts to shut her down.

More official responses to the original op-ed followed. Several groups wrote letters to the editor that came out in the Index’s May 11^th issue. A letter from the directors of Frelon provided a different approach to the topic, explaining why the dance was choreographed the way it was, its original intent. A group of male faculty and students also wrote a letter to the editor for that issue of the Index, supporting Ellen’s article and denouncing the hostility that had arisen against her. Smith said that it was “powerful to have men stand up and say, ‘This is not okay.’” A third group, a diverse group of students of different years and faculty, further supported Smith, and spoke out against the hostile backlash that she had experienced. The reactions were mixed, though on the whole Smith received support from people she talked to in person; the anonymity and space allowed by the Internet makes it easier to attack someone without fear of consequence.

Friday, May 14^th. Spring Quarter 2011. The day before Crystal Ball. This is a bright day, full of light and uncomfortable warmth. A man enters the Humphrey House in time for the 2011 edition of Bruce Mills’ English Junior Seminar. He wears a vivid blue sundress, with a plunging neckline and no back. Max Wedding is in drag for the day.

Max, a junior and co-leader of Kaleidoscope, has worn drag the day before Crystal Ball this year and the last, experiencing similar reactions to his clothing each time. His sophomore year it was somewhat accidental – he wore a skirt and feminine top to speak at the Community Reflection on Crystal Ball that day and was not able to change before his next class, so he wore drag all day. He described last year’s most memorable experience: “What comes to mind the most – the most shocking – one worker at the caf started laughing at me. It would have been very uncomfortable if I was expressing myself.” While the incident was addressed with campus authorities, that doesn’t mean that things were completely different this year. This year, Max’s dressing in drag for the day was intentional, done to see if similar reactions would be elicited.

And they were. Max spoke at the Community event and attended classes as normal. But that bright sunny day he recalled that “people would be passing on stairs and let out chuckles [...] [they] treated me differently than they would every day.” He was catcalled and received positive compliments on the dress, and in Bruce’s Junior Seminar called out as an example for the text we were discussing that day. Being called out, he said, made him uncomfortable, and had he actually been expressing himself it would have made him even more so.

For Max, gender fucking, dressing in drag this way, is his way of messing with society, of refusing to conform to norms of, in this instance, clothing. So though Max was made to feel uncomfortable while in this situation, at the end of the day he was able to take those clothes off. A male whose preference is gender expression through wearing women’s clothing, however, would have faced a much more difficult choice – stop dressing in drag and wear “normal” clothing or continue to dress in the desired fashion and face at least alienation, if not ostracism of some sort.

All of this goes to show that though Kalamazoo College bears the nickname “Gay K,” is home to a vocal LGBT student organization, has a relatively high number of LGBT students, and is known as probably the most liberal/progressive college in Michigan, the subject of gender is a hell of a lot touchier on this campus than we’d like to admit.

What do these reactions say about the campus as a whole? Smith felt that her article, and the surrounding responses, brought to the fore the “tension between a lot of people who want to move forward, want social justice dialogue […] butting up against more mainstream viewpoints. As much as it sucked to have so much public attention, [this] brought a lot of stuff to the surface.” There were mixed reactions; the college community from different sectors attacked and supported Ellen for her article. The fact that such attacks can happen in a supposedly progressive space points to the touchiness of gender issues; as Max said, “the responses to Ellen’s letter showcase the hostility we have on campus.” He also added, “K’s not quite as progressive as we say we are.”

It’s an issue that’s difficult to take on. Wedding says that we have a lot of dialogue on this, but “until it turns into something it’ll just stay dialogue. Unless we start having talk on a regular basis, shock will remain” when we see a person acting outside of their gender role. The goal, of course, would be for campus members to feel safe and comfortable while expressing their sexuality, a point that this community does not yet appear to have reached. Wedding expressed a desire to have both male and female friends gender bend, something that might help other members of the community normalize these expressions of self. Smith also believes that the dialogue brought up can help the community move forward in the long run, and credits the Arcus Center for Social Justice for attempting to facilitate a positive sex culture on campus. The Center has held many events in the area designed to provide safe spaces for dialogue between different members of the community to occur, including the recent Mapping Desires Workshop. Through these dialogues and events – both Center and student initiated – there is hope that K College as a whole will meet these issues, grapple with them, and eventually overwhelm them.