Pictured: A group from the Dartmouth Outing Club, a space on campus that works actively to cultivate gender allyship. This group was gleefully pretending to paint one another, having just finished re-staining the porch on one of the cabins they manage.
Ethnography Project: Conceptualizing Gender Allyship
Allyship is a concept often used in discussions about sexuality* and sometimes in discussions about race, but very rarely in discussions about other identities. I'm passionate about gender equity, and over the past few years have facilitated and attended a variety of discussions on the subject. These discussions, I noticed, almost never touch on allyship.
When I took a course on ethnographic research methods, I quickly realized that there is essentially no mention of gender allyship in literature – still, I was observing gender allyship taking place around me all the time. I realized that I had my own conceptualization of gender allyship, based on my understandings of allyship and gender respectively, which helped me to be a better version of myself. I wondered if and how my peers might conceptualize gender allyship, so, over the course of the 10-week quarter, I designed and conducted an ethnographic research project on conceptualizations gender allyship, which I wrote up as a 27-page paper. In order to keep my promise to my participants that their quotes and individual references to their statements would not be published, I will include the executive summary here instead of the full paper.
Executive Summary:
In order to fill a gap in the literature, this project investigated conceptualizations of gender allyship in a college undergraduate population by doing person-centered interviews with eight students. Participants discussed a range of conceptualizations of gender allyship, but some common themes did emerge: allyship seems to depend on individual motivation (to appear moral vs. to have impact vs. to feel moral) and direction of attention (e.g. to one’s own positionality, or the lived experiences of others). Allyship was conceptualized as a tokenized identity (motivated by appearing moral), as an action, or as a component of personality (e.g. curious, humble, emotionally intelligent). The discussion about gender dynamics and allyship was grounded in the participants’ social spaces, and accounts showed a marked difference between those occurring in fraternities and those occurring in the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC), a gender-inclusive social space. In fraternities, these dynamics often seemed to threaten physical safety and dignity of those who did not identify as cisgender men. In the DOC, problematic gender dynamics often included being made to feel out of place or patronized. Students also described more conversations about these dynamics, and more action to address them, in DOC spaces than in Greek spaces. These insights, in conjunction with statistical data that strongly suggests that male- dominated social spaces are largely to blame for sexual assault on campus (Jozkowski and Wiersma‐Mosley 2017), lend support to the unpopular implication that fraternities should be replaced by gender-inclusive organizations, even though some innocent men will be hurt by this change.
I think it’s interesting that I was passionate enough about gender to undertake this project years before I fully acknowledged my own genderqueerness.
*for example, a lawyer who advocates for gay rights might be considered an ally to the gay community, even if that lawyer is straight.