Gender Theory and Praxis in Poetry

MALD ’23 Christine Munson wrote a series of five poems for her finale assignment for P214: Gender Theory and Praxis with Prof. Kimberly Theidon and GAIA PhD candidate Dipali Anumol.

Inspired by the content and concepts covered in the course, Christine’s poems touch on themes of self-care, intersectional feminism, slow violence, power dynamics, and the gaps in history left by racism, sexism, and prejudice.

The five poems, included below, are titled: “Justice Bell”; “A Haiku to Dismantle the Women’s Liberation Movement”; “The Slow Burn of Slow Violence”; “Power”; and “All the Names We Do Not Know”.


I. Justice Bell

Ring the bell sister
Ring it loud
And when they tell you to stop
Ring it harder

Ring it for those before you
Whose struggle handed you the rope

Ring it for those coming
Who will wake to its sound filling the air

And ring it for you
Who came and saw and knew the injustice
Who fought for change
Who cried for loss
Who mourned for the wronged
Who taught the unknowing

Ring it for you sister
And I will ring it too


II. A Haiku to Dismantle the Women’s Liberation Movement

“Implicit in this simplistic definition of women’s liberation is a dismissal of race and class as factors that, in conjunction with sexism, determine the extent to which an individual will be discriminated against, exploited, or oppressed” – bell hooks

Emulating them
Straight, white and cis-gendered men
Keeps them at the top


III. The Slow Burn of a Slow Violence

“I think of globalization like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can’t be seen. Once you get used to not seeing something, then, slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it” – Arundhati Roy

It billows
Slowly
A cloud of black smoke

It burns
Lightly
Looming in the background

It fills the lungs of those it touches
Slows movement
Labors breath

The same fire that warms others
Shines a light for their path
The glow of bright futures
Engulfs more left exposed to the smoke

The slow burn
Of a slow violence


IV. Power

It looms
Silent
Natural in its surrounding

It changes
Shifts
Hidden in the shadows

It wraps you
Squeezing
The snake and its prey

You cannot run
You cannot fight
You cannot cry injustice

All the things you want to say and do are gone now
Survival is all you have


V. All the Names We Do Not Know

https://www.nativehope.org/en-us/understanding-the-issue-of-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women

They slip
Unknown
Through the cracks of a society
Designed to ignore them

They go
Unimportant
In the eyes of men and women
Who do not recognize them

They pass
Unacknowledged
By the books used
To teach our youth

Their mark unsung
Their fear passed over
Their pain silenced

There they go
Falling away from memory
Into the black night of history