GC Creates New Department of Herstory (Satire)
One of the first Herstory students, CUNY GC Womyn's Feminist Studies Caucus Co-Chairperson Tammy Meir Clinton-Albright, takes a moment to ponder the centuries of phallocentric oppression experienced by her gender.
Her committee said it couldn’t be done. There was no way history graduate student Kram Ebeihcs would be able to write her proposed thesis, “The Penis Dialogue: Personal Reflections on Phallic Imagery in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues,” within the Graduate Center’s conservative History Department, which is better known for its biographical work on reactionary idols like Andrew Carnegie and Ronald Reagan and for its reliance on facts.
“I was crestfallen when my proposal was rejected,” said Kram, whose male to female “transition” surgery is almost complete. “When they asked me to articulate my methodology more clearly, my response was to write a personal reflection on how this request had violated my soul. When they refused to even read that response, I put an interpretive dance of my anger on youtube. Finally they kicked me out of the program. So I reverted to my backup plan and found a professor in the English department who would sign off on my project.”
But thankfully the English Department will now be relieved of its duty as the repository for victimized scholars and their “projects.” The Grad Center has recently created the first Ph.D. program in Herstory.
“If you feel about it,” said Kram, who is serving as the program’s first spokeswomyn, “you intuit that since womyn are often taking notes at high level meetings in government and the private sector, they really have written the first drafts of history, at least since men made the mistake of teaching them how to write.”
The details of the program are still quite unknown, but that hasn’t stopped many women’s dreams about the program from being interpreted as if they have actually occurred. Although most other Grad Center programs are housed at 365 5th Avenue, many dreams have said that the Herstory program will hold classes at “CREATINGSPACE for Women” in Park Slope, where according to its website “the sacred is felt, the spiritual explored, and sisterhood unfolds.” “By jointly holding courses with CREATINGSPACE on neglected subjects like “Visioning,” “Women in Nature,” “Illuminating the Shadow” and “Listening in to the Guidance,” the Herstory program will be able to hit the ground running, or should I say, connect with the oneness of the ground in the process of rediscovering our ability to run,” said spokeswomyn Ebeihcs.
But the Herstory program’s curriculum could also be one of the most wide-ranging and demanding at the Grad Center, with courses that explore “the dark part of the self known as the Shadow,” being balanced by grueling yoga and Pilates classes, longitudinal social experiments in lesbian separatism, and actual attempts to live according to “The Rules” and the guidance of “The Skinny Bitch” books. Videos of the lesbian separatism colony could also generate significant revenue for cash-strapped CUNY.
Some in the Grad Center hierarchy have voiced concern that the courses in the department will not be welcoming enough to male grad students. “I’m sure our classes in how men use pornography to possess women will be a draw for male students,” said Ebeihcs in response. In a further plug for the class, she said, “Students will be expected to thoroughly analyze video evidence.”
Another skeptical view of the new Herstory program worries that it is essentially a Trojan horse. “First they want to join some harmless sharing circle, the next thing you know they expect you to go with them too!” said Ebeihcs’s exasperated live-in boyfriend, Erik Nilsson. Academically the belief is that Herstory could supplant History as it is practiced in a variety of other disciplines. “There’s really nothing to worry about,” said a reassuring Ebeihcs. “Look at Art History at the Grad Center. It already effectively is Art Herstory and no one is worse off.
“At the end of the day, all this negativity will dissolve like ice cream on my tongue when I eat my feelings,” Ebeihcs continued. “The Herstory program really has very modest ambitions. We are more Susan Faludi than Andrea Dworkin for sure. There is an undeclared war on women in America, we would just like to see that war officially declared. Then we will simply deny men sex until they agree to end it.”
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