This past weekend, I went to a Model UN conference to represent the Minister of Education (a racist jerk of conservative and farming heritage) in the simulation of the South African State Security Council, meeting in 1980. Each session our committee went forward 2 years, making decisions that would preserve the apartheid regime. We sang national anthems, assassinated people at our own discretion; it was clearly a play in political fantasy, yet there was so much more to it than that.
Besides conflicting feelings on what it means to reenact racialized conflicts like the near-genocidal experience of Blacks in South Africa, I also let my "gendered ear" do some listening to a mostly-male group.
There were five women on my committee. Five out of fifteen. Two of the women didn't talk at all; all of the boys had something to say at least a fair amount of the time. The other women who did speak did no do so in a way that seemed as confident as most of the males. While admittedly one of the ladies spoke with masterful language and unapologetic emotion, she was the only one who did. True, this experience does not necessitate any kind of conclusion regarding gendered relations, but it's an important observation.
It reminded me of what we discussed in class when women formulate thoughts into question to be confirmed rather than facts to be understood or thoughts to be listend to carefully. The disproportionate amount of females on an intense, war-oriented crisis committee not only shows the way in which males and females circumscribe their own spectrum of political interests, but also how women might not feel compelled to speak to the same extent or as often as men, especially when they are being judged for their accuracy, employment of language and reference to law and history.
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