Daily Challenge: Surmounting the Language Barrier

For non-native speakers like myself, the Dutch language can be challenging and intimidating. After living here in the Netherlands for almost twenty years, I still haven’t managed to master the host country’s native language.

It is not that I cannot speak the language at all. In fact, I have managed to secure a job in which Dutch proficiency is mandatory. However, my accent is so thick that it could cut the air. Many have difficulties in understanding what I am saying.

And people do make assumptions not only based on one’s skin colour, but also based on one’s accept. If an individual has an accent, people sometimes assume that this individual is not intelligent enough.

Kimberly Crenshaw’s Intersectionality: Informing the Analysis on the Experiences of Queer of Colours in Western Societies

The concept of intersectionality is one of the most valuable idea I have acquired while studying gender studies in the university some years ago. This concept did not only informed the theoretical framing of my research project,  but needless to say that as a queer of colour in a predominantly white society, it has also provided me the perspective through which I can make sense of my own positionalities. Furthermore, intersectionality has also equipped me with vocabularies through which my experience as queer of colour can be articulated.

Kimberly Crenshaw, a Black feminist and a legal scholar, coined the idea of intersectionality. It first appeared in her seminal article entitled: ‘Demagrinalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’ which was published in 1989. Here, Crenshaw argues that:

Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated (1989:140).

Exclusionary Experiences Through Accommodation: When People Assume I Do Not Speak Dutch

One of the few things that slightly irritates me while living in the host country is that when people here are quick to assume that I do not speak Dutch and would speak English to me right away. This is irritating because it reminds me that I do not belong here. Why do they assume that I do not speak Dutch? What gave it away? Is it because of the colour of my skin?

I live here for quite a while now and yet I do still feel a newcomer. To be honest, I do still find the Dutch language to be intimidating even though I speak the language relatively well despite of my strong foreign accent.

The Catholic, The Queer, and Probably an Unbeliever Too?

Here is a random Sunday thought for you: Although I do not consider myself as a religious person nor a believer of an anthropomorphic God (at least not the way I used to believe), I nonetheless religiously attend  masses every Sunday like a devout catholic. Over the years, I have become convinced that going to church is not always about religion and that there are many different ways of believing.

Gender Studies? Why Study Gender Studies in the First Place?

In the previous blog entry, I recounted a conversation I had with somebody – a sort of which I often had and perhaps will continue to have – about the degree I took in the university, namely, Gender Studies. It is quite often that I find myself in a situation in which I justify, if not apologize, studying Gender Studies in graduate school.

Gender Studies? What about gender? There are men and women, what is so complicated about it? Why the need to study gender and to study in graduate school in the first place? And here is the question I find most irritating of all: ‘what can you do with it’, which also reads: ‘how can you earn money from it’?