Looking back on this as a senior:
We wrote this cultural self-portrait just a few weeks into GEM 205. I believe it was intended as a way to document where we were in understanding our cultural positions at the beginning of our GEM journey, and by extension, understanding the complexities of cultural identity in general. Reading this post back now, there’s something endearingly silly about it. I see myself trying to describe my life experiences through lenses and keywords I had just discovered, but probably didn’t yet understand. What, indeed, is “dominant American culture?” Did I really have a working definition of it?
I appreciate my instinct to analyze how each of these identities change based on what space I’m in; I can see that I’ve thought deeply about them and how I experience them. Of course, there are things missing. One that comes to mind immediately is thinking about the “visibility” of cultural identities. I describe my religion and queerness as things that place me outside of “dominant” culture, but there’s more nuance in how that affects your internal experience based on how others perceive that identity, whether those people are strangers or your closest friends. These aren’t always things people guess about me at first glance— although that in no way means that internally experiencing myself as different doesn’t affect my life experience or contribute to how I think about culture.
Unfortunately, another reason that I would write differently about these identities is because their social significance has changed. As an anti-Zionist, I feel strange disclosing my religion to a new person I meet, in a way that I didn’t feel before October 7th, because I always wonder if they’re making assumptions about me that deeply contradict my own values. The divisions in my religious community over an issue that I perceive as dire and morally clear-cut have distanced me from seeking community through Judaism in more general spaces where I don’t know which viewpoints to expect (even though I’m always the first one to argue that there are tons of anti-Zionist Jews). To some extent, it’s distanced me from thinking of Judaism as a core part of my cultural identity— although, of course, it is, because it will always be the culture I was raised with.
At the time of writing this reflection, I felt more free than ever to explore what being “culturally queer” meant; I was at a small liberal arts school, and the country was going in the “right direction” with respect to my rights. Now, I live under an administration that is determined to chip away at my rights however possible, and I’m already backtracking on which dimensions of my queer identity I feel comfortable publicizing, some of which I wasn’t yet aware of when I wrote the original reflection. Visibility comes back into this in a way that I also didn’t talk about in my original post, although unfortunately in a deteriorating context. It’s a privilege that I could choose to pass myself off as a cisgender, heterosexual woman when I’m walking down the street without my partner, and it means that I experience these attacks on our community very differently— but it’s also something I don’t want to do. Nonetheless, the question of visibility and safety is something that inevitably affects the experience of marginalized identities.
While it’s sad to think of some of the ways that this reflection would have been different now, it also warms my heart to see how much progress I’ve made on an intellectual level throughout all of my experiences at Wesleyan and in the components of the GEM minor; to me, this reflection is concrete evidence that I am much more equipped to understand these concepts now than when I began.
