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Gender Centers in Higher Education: Spaces for Cultivating Critical Hope

Matthew Jeffries and Ashley S. Boyd

Historically, marginalized college students across the globe have feared for their safety and their rights both on and off campus. The current global political climate perpetuates these uncertainties, with individuals' statuses being questioned not only through harsh immigration policies but also through the growing emphasis on policing gender and sexuality in schools and public spaces (e.g. in Russia and the United States). In these turbulent times, campus centers focused on gender have a great opportunity to support students, faculty, and staff and to offer a platform for dealing productively with the social challenges at hand.

This chapter will first describe the history and evolution of university gender centers, connecting their development to political and social contexts with relation to the women's movement and the LGBTQ+ movement.1 Historically, these centers are predominately located in the United States, with a few in Canada. It then posits critical hope as a framework from which to examine the work of gender centers and the actions of practitioners within them. It closes with a look at the implications for the future of such spaces, suggesting specific practices to cultivate and maintain university students' analytic yet optimistic stances in their current and future lives.

Women's Centers

Women's centers emerged on U.S. college campuses in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the women's movement and second‐wave feminism (Gould 1989; Kasper 2004; Marine 2011a; Willinger 2002). Now there are more than 400 in the United States and Canada. While originally focused on education and support, women's centers have expanded in response to the needs of their communities and have begun to include work on men and masculinities and on trans* identities (Marine 2011a). Without including feminist men, it is difficult to make change. By not including trans* individuals, especially trans* women, a women's center is not serving all women or its campus community.

As second‐wave feminism ushered in the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, women advocated for being seen on campuses (Marine 2011a). In the early 1970s, offices of equal opportunity, women's studies courses, and women in faculty were rare or non‐existent (Gould 1989). Deans of women and deans of men had merged to become deans of students in the 1960s, leaving no one to assist with the “sense of identity for women students, someone with whom they could talk about issues directly affecting them and not generally affecting their male peers” (Brooks 1988, p. 18). This change led to women's centers and women's studies being established at universities across the United States. Gould (1989) found these centers were established through hard work over long periods of time by committees comprising women constituents of the institutions (e.g. students, faculty, staff, and alumnae). At some institutions, the administration acquiesced to those who wanted a women's center by granting space and a budget. At those that did not willingly create a women's center, Gould (1989) notes that women protested by taking over space such as the president's office or through hosting on‐campus rallies.

Gould (1989) also writes that the centers were diverse in scope and shaped by those who created and oversaw them. Some focused on the general support of women, others centered on addressing discrimination against women in areas of pay equity and safety, and still others focused on women's studies or bridging women in the community with women in the academy. In a different piece, Gould (1997) reflects back on her role as part of a team that created the women's center at Barnard College in 1970, describing the beginnings of the center in a small room with a director who had other duties on campus and a meager budget.

Functions

The five areas that women's centers have historically been concerned with are (i) safety, (ii) education, (iii) activism and advocacy, (iv) service provision, and (v) community (Kunkel 2002; Marine 2011a). Though each campus foregrounds various elements of these concerns, they are consistent focus areas in the literature on women's centers.

Safety

Safety is a ubiquitous concern for women on campuses. In the United States, nearly one in five women are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault while in college (Krebs et al. 2007). Women's centers are vital in sexual assault prevention work (Marine 2011a). One manifestation of safety implementation is Washington State University's Cougar Safe Ride Program (formerly Women's Transit), which is operated through its Women's Resource center. The program was established in 1977 as a “program to prevent sexual assault” (Kasper 2004). It originally provided door‐to‐door transportation late at night to women, and eventually expanded to include all students. Numerous universities now have similar programs. Other examples of programmatic implementation include access to crisis lines and survivor advocates either through the university or via a local organization (Marine 2011a). At some institutions, administrators have created initiatives to address violence and train students, staff, and faculty on how to intervene as a bystander.

Education

The education that stems from women's centers is broad. For some centers, education occurs through workshops or outreach programming. For others, it occurs through the women's (or gender) studies academic program. Some centers offer both types of educational opportunity to their campus.

Additionally, more informal educational endeavors also occur at most women's centers. These include presentations and other outreach programming. For instance, the University of Idaho offers presentations on both feminism and men and masculinities. These programming options allow women's centers to help students in their activism and to educate their constituents. They also enable them to educate the campus community on issues that it might not otherwise be made aware of.

Other informal educational opportunities offered by women's centers include programming that complements students' studies, such as Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, Take Back the Night, and the Clothesline Project. Walk a Mile in Her Shoes is an international men's march that was set up to draw attention to issues of sexual violence perpetrated by men against women. Relating to the old adage of walking a mile in someone else's shoes in order to understand their perspective on the world, it asks men to walk 1 mile wearing high‐heeled shoes. Take Back the Night is an event to highlight issues around violence against women. It usually includes a march through campus and ends with a candlelight vigil or a speak‐out. Some Take Back the Night events have not permitted men to participate (even those who are sexual assault survivors) in order to focus the event on women and systemic issues related to sexual assault. The Clothesline Project features shirts with intimate personal violence survivors' and victims' narratives painted on them, usually by the survivor themselves. The different shirt colors represent different abuses (e.g. white for those who have died, black for a politically motivated attack). These shirts are displayed in public areas on campus or in the community for those interested in reading the short narratives.

Activism and Advocacy

From the beginning of women's centers, advocacy was a vital component of their missions. Many centers take on advocacy work either through standing committees or via ad hoc task forces; at times, the center staff create these work groups to address issues they see facing women on their campuses. For example, Allen (2001) used her power as a women's center director to explain to the university's council that while its policies were legally compliant, they did not work for the women they were supposed to serve. She argued that the attorneys' job was “to protect the university from lawsuits, not seek justice for victims” (p. 12). According to Marine (2011a), a “willingness to take a stand on behalf of a needed change on campus” is a pinnacle role of women's centers (p. 19). Still, change within the academy has proven complex and difficult to achieve. As Allen (2001), a director herself, writes, “we have the added challenge of changing course in midstream, with bosses, who don't want to change course, still paying our checks and hiring and firing us” (p. 14).

Service Provision

Aligned with advocacy and activism for women on campuses, services such as lactation spaces, assistance for pregnant students and those with children, food pantries, and clothing exchanges have become a part of many women's centers. The Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity (n.d.) at the University of Kansas, for example, provides a list of spaces where women can pump or breastfeed, along with the amenities available at each (e.g. lockable room, running water to clean machinery).

In the United States, Title IX dictates that institutions receiving federal funds cannot discriminate against students who are pregnant or are parents. At some institutions, women's centers are the entity responsible for helping pregnant students and students with children. For instance, Kent State University has a comprehensive webpage devoted to answering frequently asked questions and offers to have someone meet with students and discuss any questions or concerns around this issue.

As food insecurity continues to be researched, administrators have realized that opening food pantries is an important component of helping students succeed. Women's centers have been responsible for creating some of these resources (e.g. Grand Valley State University, California State University Northridge). Additionally, women's center staff members often work on food drives to ensure that there is food for those who need it.

Community

Some women's centers focus on cultivating a community among on‐ and off‐campus constituents, and all possible intersections of the two. Kunkel (1994) advocates that women need community on campus, but notes that this will look different for each individual woman. For example, Arizona State University has a Faculty Women's Association with a mission to be an “active advocate for increasing the status and participation of women on the ASU campus since 1954” (www.asu.edu). The President and Provost's Council on Women at The Ohio State University, meanwhile, advocates for women and creates community with and for its women members (www.osu.edu). This type of council is often referred to at other institutions as a President's Commission on the Status of Women. The role that each women's center plays in interacting with these other groups varies by campus.

Concerns

Even though women's centers have made great strides toward equality in the last 60 years, the centers and their staff still face several issues. These include issues of funding and how to include men and those of diverse gender identities/expressions.

Funding

A common problem for women's centers is funding. In her study, Kasper (2004) found that 69% of her respondents were concerned about their finances. Some of their concerns were focused on programming funding while others centered on staffing considerations. This had not changed from Clevenger's (1988) study, where she found that nearly all 124 centers that she looked at ranked funding as their primary worry. Funding for institutions is of continual concern, but the work that women's centers do to improve conditions for women is imperative to supporting a diverse student body.

Men

While women's centers focus on women and their issues, there is demand to include men in this work. Without including men, there cannot be widespread change, because of the power that men hold in the system and in terms of sheer numbers. However, including men is a challenge to women's centers (Kasper 2004). Of Kasper's (2004) respondents, 8% hosted programs focused on masculinity. Other examples of programming directed at men included: testicular and prostate cancer awareness, a group on being a father, and steroid abuse programming (Kasper 2004). In the past decade, the masculinity conversation has grown in higher education. Therefore, in the future, centers might consider changing their name from “women's centers” to “gender centers”; however, with multiple constituencies to manage, this could be a difficult change (Marine et al. 2017).

One of the concerns over including men in women's center programming is the complexity of creating a “safe space” for women when men are present (Marine et al. 2017). Marine et al. (2017) define a safe space as a “space that is (relatively) free of oppression and that exists to amplify women's voices toward their empowerment” (p. 52). Creating a safe space is difficult if those who are inhabiting it are not aware of their privilege or do not fully believe in the feminist mission of women's centers. It can also be difficult for women to feel comfortable in the presence of men if they have experienced violence by men, as triggering actions or expressions might be evoked.

The Future of Women's Centers

Nearly 60 years after the founding of the first women's center in 1960, they are continuing to look forward. While their primary focus has been on cisgender women, more are beginning to examine how they can include trans* individuals and men in their programming. However, balancing tradition with a move toward gender inclusivity is rife with tensions (Marine et al. 2017).

Kasper (2004) discusses that many centers struggle with how to incorporate or specifically target men. One study found that women's centers were reinforcing a gender binary by including cisgender men more often than trans* and gender‐non‐conforming individuals (Marine et al. 2017). Marine et al. (2017) argue for gender‐inclusive practice, which includes “people of all genders in women's and gender center programming, events, use of space, and staff” (p. 50). They found that gender‐inclusive practices were positively reviewed and seen as a part of promoting social justice and bringing men into the conversation around gender‐based violence (Marine et al. 2017).

As men become more active on gender issues, the conversation around complex masculinities continues on college campuses. On several campuses, there are centers specifically focused on men and masculinity. One example is at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the Men and Masculinities center's mission is to “support male student success and the development of masculinities that are healthy for individuals and communities at UMass Amherst and beyond from a male positive, multicultural, and pro‐feminist perspective” (www.umass.edu). Instead of piling more work on women's center staff, some institutions are creating new spaces for these conversations.

LGBT Centers

Gender identity/expression and sexual orientation centers, more commonly referred to as LGBT centers, were originally created to work toward inclusion of lesbian and gay students. However, their missions have dramatically expanded since their early creation. Now, over 200 LGBT centers exist across the United States, which focus on assessment, support, education, and advocacy for LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and staff (www.lgbtcampus.org; Marine 2011b).

History

The first LGBT center, known as the Lesbian‐Gay Male Programs Office, opened at the University of Michigan in 1971 (Marine 2011b). Some further centers opened in the 1980s, but the majority appeared in the 1990s (Sanlo 2000). This timing aligns with the beginning of the gay rights movement in the 1970s, post‐Stonewall, and the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the 1990s and continuing today. The earliest LGBT centers focused on lesbian and gay students. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they began to change their names to include all members of the LGBTQ+ community. Some became pride centers, others gender and sexuality centers. Marine and Nicolazzo (2014) write that there are tensions around naming practices. In their study of 19 institutions, they found that half had added “transgender” or “T” to their name since being founded (Marine and Nicolazzo 2014). They critique names such as “pride center” because they obscure “mention of which communities are meant to be prideful,” leading “to a lack of clarity for individuals seeking out the resource as a safe haven for trans* identities” (p. 270).

Unfortunately, as the political climate in the United States changes, these centers are under attack in conservative spaces. In the state of Tennessee, the flagship institution had its funding for the Office for Diversity and Inclusion, which includes the LGBT center, rerouted to other scholarship initiatives due to legislatures' concerns over the promotion of gender‐inclusive pronouns, sex education, and inclusive holiday parties (Ohm 2017). The concern over political correctness could hurt the ability for new LGBT centers to open at institutions where students need support because they have not received it at home or in other institutional spaces.

Functions

In this section, we focus on the common LGBT center functions as outlined by Marine (2011b). In Damschroder's (2015) comprehensive analysis of LGBT centers, he lists nine activities and practices on which these centers focus, but these can be aligned with the four areas that Marine (2011b) discusses.

Support

Supporting students is the most visible element of LGBT centers. From assisting with coming out to confronting homophobia and transphobia on campus, center staff exist to support students. This support is invaluable to a myriad of students as they navigate the complexity of coming out to their friends, family, and classmates and coping with their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Additionally, center staff support students who experience homophobia or transphobia (among other forms of oppression) at the institution by consoling them and encouraging them to file a complaint with the appropriate authorities.

Needs Assessment and Evaluations

Assessing the needs of LGBTQ+ students has been a vital role of LGBT centers since their inception, though it has changed over time. Assessment has long focused on campus climate surveys and needs assessments, but it has lately begun also to include program evaluation (e.g. by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education, CAS) through both qualitative and quantitative methods (Damschroder 2015).

Campus climate surveys measure the perceived inclusivity of LGBTQ+ students among the student body. These assessments are sometimes a part of a larger campus climate survey that includes questions on race and gender (with a focus on women). Such surveys are usually deployed by committees (e.g. the University of North Florida's Commission on Diversity: Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equity), one of whose members is the person responsible for the campus LGBT center. The committee then takes the results of the survey and makes recommendations to the administration on how to proceed. These results also give insight into the needs of the LGBT center (e.g. more funding, more staff, more space).

In contrast to campus climate surveys, program evaluations such as the CAS are used to evaluate LGBT centers themselves. The CAS standards for LGBT programs include a staff self‐assessment based on best practices, looking at how to evaluate the program's mission, programming, and funding.

Education

LGBT centers offer educational outreach to the campus community, usually focused on being allies or creating safe zones. Additionally, they offer educational opportunities for members of the LGBTQ+ community to learn more about its rich diversity and history. These latter opportunities are important, as few K–12 schools include LGBTQ+ history.

The educational outreach that center staff offer aims to inform heterosexual and cisgender people about the LGBTQ+ community (Damschroder 2015). It is most often targeted at departments, student groups, or classes. One form of outreach is through safe zone or ally training. Such programs serve several purposes. The first is symbolic (Damschroder 2015). By having a training option, the institution demonstrates that it is concerned with LGBTQ+ individuals (Damschroder 2015). Second, the programs offer a structured curriculum that reflects institutional needs (Damschroder 2015). This curriculum might include: how to support students who come out; a deconstruction of the differences between sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression; and an exploration of power and heterosexual/cisgender privilege. Fianlly, safe‐zone programs create “networks of support” (Damschroder 2015, p. 238), which operate institution‐wide to change the culture to be more LGBTQ+ inclusive.

Advocacy

Akin to staff at women's centers, LGBT center staff are also change agents. From the aforementioned educational outreach to committees and policy meetings, LGBT center administrators work to change institutionalized heteronormative policies and procedures. Changes can come through several avenues.

First, they come from student requests. Students often bring up issues with policies that are not working for them, such as student identification cards that do not reflect chosen names2 to a lack of availability of hormone replacement therapy at the student clinic. This type of change requires administrators, both LGBT center staff and others, to listen to and amplify what students are saying. Second, changes frequently come from comparisons with other institutions. Through the Campus Pride Index and other benchmarking processes, institutions are constantly comparing themselves to one another. When one institution has a more inclusive policy in place, many times, its peers will adapt their own policies to be congruent.

The Future of LGBT Centers

As the global political climate shifts, LGBT centers will continue to play an important role in supporting queer students. LGBT centers will need to support queer students through their coming‐out processes and over homophobic and transphobic experiences that they have on campus. Additionally, LGBT center staff will need to continue advocacy with administration to change policies that do not include LGBTQ+ students. One helpful framework for conceptualizing the current status of the work accomplished in LGBT centers and in planning for future work is critical hope, which we turn to in the remainder of this chapter.

Critical Hope: A Framework for Examining the Work of Gender Centers

Hope, as a theoretical and motivational concept, has been linked to structural oppression and struggles for social change throughout history. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, noted the Emancipation Proclamation was “a great beacon light of hope to millions.” Nelson Mandela (2000), in the struggle to end apartheid, avowed, “Our human compassion binds us the one to the other … as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.” Mohammad Kaddour, a freelance Syrian journalist who lost his leg during a battle, said, “Hope is all I have” (Tamim 2017). Hope, then, is an entity to which those in pain, and especially those seeking radical upheaval (hooks 2003), must cling.

Freire (1970), one of the forefathers of critical education, echoed the need for hope when seeking to mediate repressive conditions, but he extended the notion as essential in educational spaces. He championed classrooms as sites where hope can be cultivated and brought to life through dialog, a process in which teachers and students learn from one another and “in which all grow” (p. 80). Still, he believed, “hope is necessary, but it is not enough … Alone, it does not win” (p. 8). “Practice,” too, is essential for hope “to become historical concreteness” (p. 9). Without acting on hope, without striving to achieve a better world, the sentiment becomes stagnant and can turn into despair. Hope and action, then, should be inextricable; while hope may be a driving force, the actions that accompany it – marches, sit‐ins, documentation, dissemination to address or expose injustice – are its complements.

“Critical hope,” an extension of the sort of hope that Freire (1992) posited for change in education, is a notion theorized by Duncan‐Andrade (2009) and is the key concept upon which we draw in this chapter. While Duncan‐Andrade's framework explicitly focuses on working with urban youth, his explication of the struggles experienced by marginalized populations encompasses, we feel, those in the lives of women and LGBTQ+ communities. We therefore broaden his paradigm to apply it to the students that gender centers serve and to examine how it is that such centers foster critical hope.

Duncan‐Andrade (2009) begins by decrying the forms of hope that are unsuccessful when working with students. He points to three such false hopes. The first is “hokey hope” (p. 182), which he laments for its tendency to focus blindly on ideas of meritocracy and its avoidance of structural inequities. He notes, “this hope is ‘hokey’ because it ignores the laundry list of inequities … that reinforce an uneven playing field” (p. 182). In the context of the marginalized students with whom gender centers work, hokey hope is rampant. One manifestation of this form can be seen in the pervasive attitude that, as many college campuses have protections and supports in place for students, they thus have equal opportunities and should be able to succeed on their own. Rankin's (2003) national campus climate survey found “Forty‐one percent of respondents stated that their college/university was not addressing issues related to sexual orientation/gender identity” (p. 5), while Rankin et al. (2010) found in a similar survey that “LGBQ respondents were twice as likely to be targets of derogatory remarks (61%), stared at (37%), and singled out as ‘resident authority’ regarding LGBT issues due to their identity (36%) when compared with their heterosexual counterparts (29%, 17%, and 18%, respectively)” (p. 10). Hokey hope ignores problems and statistics such as these and instead advances an agenda that relies on the existence of policies such as Title IX to blindly encourage students to carry on in their college careers, assuming personal responsibility for any obstacles they might face. As Duncan‐Andrade (2009) writes, “it is a false hope informed by privilege and rooted in the optimism of the spectator who needs not suffer – a ‘let them eat cake’ utterance that reveals a fundamental incomprehension of suffering” (p. 183). University officials, often as spectators with heterosexual privilege, possess the advantage of adhering to supposedly objective statutes and claiming to have satisfied the pragmatic demands of working with affected student populations. Their “checking off of boxes” and promulgation of hokey hope often does not translate to the sort of support that university students actually need.

The second form of hope that Duncan‐Andrade (2009) deconstructs is that of mythical hope, which he describes as:

a profoundly ahistorical and depoliticized denial of suffering that is rooted in celebrating individual exceptions. These individuals are used to construct a myth of meritocracy that simultaneously fetishizes them as objects of that myth. Ultimately, mythical hope depends on luck and the law of averages to produce individual exceptions to the tyranny of injustice, and thus it denies the legitimacy of the suffering of the oppressed. (p. 184)

Mythical hope, then, beholds figures such as Angela Merkel, Anderson Cooper, and Laverne Cox as examples to show that society has become accepting of strong women and those in the LGBTQ+ community. As such, mythical hope is “a false narrative of equal opportunity emptied of its historical and political contingencies” (Duncan‐Andrade 2009, p. 183). It ignores years of oppression and discounts the rightful distrust of social systems for their discriminatory actions. It also overlooks any current manifestations or consequences of prejudice, such as stark rates of suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2016), 42.8% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth have seriously considered suicide, in contrast with 14% of their heterosexual peers. From the perspective of mythical hope, negative occurrences such as suicide are conceptualized as isolated instances. They do not reflect broader society, in which policies supposedly exist that support queer individuals, such as same‐sex marriage rights. With such statutes in place, one who possesses mythical hope might believe, it is impossible to argue that oppression still exists. Yet, “a single event, cannot, by itself, provide the healing and long‐term sustenance required to maintain hope amid conditions of suffering”(Duncan‐Andrade 2009, p. 184). Claiming that one policy, or law, or person, can erase the historic inequities marginalized university students have faced “is to peddle a mythical hope” (p. 184).

Finally, the third form of false hope that Duncan‐Andrade (2009) cautions against is that of hope deferred. Those who perpetuate this category perceive the “daunting hardships” students face, and, while they do not blame the victim, they instead turn to “blaming the economy, the violence in society, the lack of social services, the ‘system’” (p. 184). Therefore, while educators, for example, might discern the social inequities that plague marginalized students, they are unable to channel their negative response into productive action. Rather, they defer hope for a vision of a better society or for the affected individual's rise and assimilation into dominant society. They do not, in essence, seek to change the present, to “manage the immediate stressors in one's daily life” (p. 184), but promote a culture of inaction, of waiting on someone else or something else to come along. Perhaps deferred hope is nowhere as evident as in the popular “It Gets Better Project,” which began in 2010 with author Dan Savage's video encouraging LGBTQ+ youth experiencing harassment to forge on. Now boasting over 50 000 videos from celebrities, politicians, and activists, the campaign created a “personal way” (www.itgetsbetter.org) to spread a message of hope. Albeit well‐meaning, the project has been critiqued for a lack of attention to the current circumstances of individuals across the spectrum of gender and sexual orientation and as a way for “privileged folks to do nothing and just rely on the imaginary mechanics of the American Dream to fix the world” (Femmephane 2010, para. 9). Furthermore, Van Horn (2014) contends, “Savage's video uses a hegemonic Queer American Dream to blame queer teens for killing themselves, urges queers to find liberation by migrating to metropolitan gayborhoods, and encourages allies to remain passive with their support” (p. 1). The sort of deferred hope that the project creates ignores the immediate needs of students, and this “putting off” creates educational spaces where the kinds of support that students need are often not met.

Instead of these various forms of false hope, Duncan‐Andrade (2009) advocates for critical hope, which notes the importance of practitioners who work with marginalized students recognizing and affirming their often harsh realities. We now turn to a description of the different forms of critical hope and describe ways that gender centers cultivate critical hope in the students they serve.

Gender Centers as Spaces for Fostering Critical Hope

Duncan‐Andrade (2009), in the title of his essay on critical hope, “Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete,” refers to song lyrics by the famous rap artist Tupac Shakur and his notion that “young people who emerge in defiance of socially toxic environments” are “the ‘roses that grow from concrete’” (p. 186). Gender centers, as spaces on university campuses that often serve young adults living in a bleak social milieu, can provide a significant source of nourishment that such individuals need for support and growth. Against the sorts of hokey, mythical, and deferred hopes just described, gender centers can offer a different sort of optimism that models activism, speaks to students where they are, and encourages them toward realistic goals.

Material Hope

Though Duncan‐Andrade (2009) outlines three forms of critical hope, he is careful to note they are “mutually constitutive” (p. 186). The first, material hope, is “the quality of … teaching, along with the resources and networks we connect our students to” (p. 186). It involves, then, the actual time and care of the practitioner, the giving of the self, to students to show care and concern. In terms of resources, material hope involves providing the means for marginalized students to appropriately deal with the conditions they face. Those who embody material hope connect to “the harsh realities” of students' lives (p. 187) and do not ignore the tragedies that happen to them, but rather either are themselves a means for support through such tragedies or establish the networks needed to do so. Recognizing that they are working with students, practitioners simultaneously maintain the importance of academics and rigor while providing these additional aspects. As Duncan‐Andrade (2009) describes, sometimes practitioners who exhibit material hope connect students literally with financial resources, but “more importantly, an effective teacher is herself a material resource: an indispensable person who can connect schooling to the real, material conditions of … life” (p. 187).

Gender centers and those who work within them offer material hope in a number of ways. First, the existence of the center itself is a form of such hope. That students have a tangible space to go to for support itself provides an element of hope. These institutions offer recognition, affirmation, and validation for students on their campuses, a place where their voices can be heard. Gender center staff connect with students to better understand their hardships both inside and outside of the university. Through these relationships, center staff assist students in understanding how their education connects to the world outside of college. Many students will already have a firm grasp on how their engineering or education degree connects to the external world. The center staff can help them understand and contextualize how their experiences and “soft skills” can also help them in their future career. Soft skills, a set of qualities that stems from a person's attributes, are different from strict skills, which are learned in a classroom (e.g. coding, mathematical computation, translations). They include the abilities to resolve conflict resolution, to work in a group, and to lead others. The connections between soft skills and future career paths can be elucidated through small groups or one‐on‐one conversations, or via programming and events.

Besides connecting soft skills to students' future careers, gender centers also assist students in managing the emotional labor that they contribute to any given space. Emotional labor is the affective work that individuals contribute to others either to comfort them or to explain why something is problematic (Brotheridge & Grandey 2002; Hartley 2017). Disadvantaged individuals expend considerable emotional labor when they explain to privileged individuals the hardships they experience. Gender center staff can help students understand how to take time for themselves, especially if they are being asked to speak on behalf of their identity group(s) frequently.

Furthermore, gender centers often offer academic support for students, such as tutoring in specific disciplines and writing guidance. Offering tutoring in topic areas of relevance to frequent visitors to a center helps them ask for material help. Additionally, having tutors or writing guides to assist students with their writing skills benefits them in all of their courses. Without these skills – asking for help and learning how to improve their writing – students will likely be unsuccessful in their coursework.

Finally, gender centers' directors and staff, by listening to students and responding to their needs, provide the material hope that the students need. In light of the historic election of Donald Trump and his policies targeting marginalized communities, gender center staff must acknowledge, unpack, and work to resolve such decrees with students, using material hope. In addition, President Trump did not renew the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) action that was implemented under President Obama. DACA allowed those who were brought to the United States illegally as children to work and prevented them from being deported (www.berkeley.edu). After the announcement of the scheme's cancellation, undocumented advocacy groups began raising money to help pay the $495 fee for those who needed to renew their DACA status within the 1‐month grace period that the Trump administration offered. In instances such as these, gender centers can help those affected financially, either through fundraisers or by drawing on discretionary funds. At its most basic, then, material hope serves financial necessity also.

Socratic Hope

The second form of critical hope that Duncan‐Andrade (2009) outlines is Socratic hope, which, he explains, takes a tremendous amount of courage to enact. It “requires both teachers and students to painfully examine our lives and actions within an unjust society and to share the sensibility that pain may pave the path to justice” (pp. 187–188). Practitioners who embody Socratic hope believe that the pain and anger marginalized students feel and express is warranted in light of what they experience in society. Rather than being “deserving of punishment” (p. 188), expressions of anger should be acknowledged and examined. Those who work with students in educational spaces and illustrate Socratic hope engage in their own self‐reflection and self‐critique, recognizing how they are complicit in systems of oppression and how they might act for change. Their self‐reflection extends to how they work with students in gender centers and the degrees of their success or failure, striving always to design programming and create better resources for those with whom they work. If they do not fully reach a student or if they think more can be done, they revise their work again and again to determine a path to achievement. Finally, they make sacrifices to support the students with whom they work, giving up their time and repeatedly going above and beyond the call of duty.

Gender centers demonstrate Socratic hope through the relationships engendered between their staff and students, which the staff can mobilize to check on the students and continuously encourage them to keep up with classes, extracurricular activities, and community involvement. Recognizing their justified indignation, gender centers also offer a space in which marginalized students can vent and dialog with their peers, engage with others who are struggling “just like them,” and discern that there are adults and people in positions of power who see and validate their pain, who “prioritize the humanization of students above all else” (Duncan‐Andrade 2009, p. 188). However, such recognition does not excuse “students from their responsibilities” or “let them … slip into despair – rather, the Socratic project” should help the students work through their struggles and strive toward success (p. 189). Practitioners are honest about the fact that “there will still be forms of social misery that confront our students” (p. 189), but they carry on regardless.

Audacious Hope

Closely related to Socratic hope is audacious hope, which

boldly stands in solidarity with [marginalized] communities, sharing the burden of their undeserved suffering as a manifestation of humanizing hope in our collective capacity for healing. Second, critical hope audaciously defies the dominant ideology of defense, entitlement, and preservation of privileged bodies at the expense of the policing, disposal, and the dispossession of marginalized “others.”

(Duncan‐Andrade 2009, p. 190)

First, then, audacious hope shares in the struggle with marginalized students. Empathizing and legitimizing are key to this form. No one is removed from a space that promotes critical hope, regardless of the manifestations of their pain. By listening for understanding and then sharing their pain, administrators in gender centers help build relationships with their students. Not all students share their pain in the same way. Some may talk to administrators one on one, others may talk at a common table, and some will confront issues that they deem to be causing their pain. Administrators must remain flexible in understanding how differently pain manifests itself. Just as Duncan‐Andrade (2009) considered removing children who were disobedient from his classroom, it can be easy to rationalize removing those who are killjoys or who act out. However, centers cannot remove those who are killjoys, because they are experiencing tremendous pain. If centers exclude individuals, communities cannot heal.

Furthermore, audacious hope also involves taking action. It asks not “how to manage students with these emotions” but instead “how to help students channel them” (Duncan‐Andrade 2009, p. 190). Thus, it denotes the ability to facilitate students who work productively with their pain to act on it. Practitioners with audacious hope struggle alongside their students and act for change themselves, serving as visible models who support the causes they advocate. In this way, they show they have “courage and commitment” (p. 191), potentially getting students on board with productive action who might not yet have had the confidence or wherewithal to consider it themselves. Students are always watching the adults with whom they work, so seeing how their administrators deal with setbacks and obstacles is instrumental in developing their responses. This modeling also includes acute attention to what is within the control of the individual and working toward tangible goals. It requires constant work, as Duncan‐Andrade (2009) avows: “Audacious hope stares down the painful path; and despite overwhelming odds against us making it down that path to change, we make the journey again and again” (p. 191).

Gender centers and those who work within them are the bastions of audacious hope. The programs that they design and host are often actions themselves, and they take actions to ensure inclusive policies on campuses. Duncan‐Andrade (2009) discusses how educators cannot stop the external “social toxins” that students bring into the classroom (p. 190). Similarly, student affairs practitioners cannot stop the pervasive social toxins (e.g. homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, White supremacy) that students, faculty, and staff experience both inside and outside of institutions. However, just because these toxins cannot be stopped immediately does not mean that they cannot be confronted. For example, institutions have the ability to allow students to use their chosen names in their systems. Another example is programming to the intersections, meaning specifically acknowledging and addressing how multiple forms of oppression overlap and affect individuals. No one is gendered in a vacuum. The intersections between race, class, gender, sex, and sexual orientation (among other things) are imperative in having productive discussions around critical hope.

Continuing to Cultivate Critical Hope

Gender centers employ a host of practices that foster critical hope in their students. While these are all valuable and worth continuing, there are additional methods we suggest for working toward the different kinds of hope Duncan‐Andrade (2009) outlines and for extending these centers' services in helpful ways. First, careful attention must be paid not only to who is hired to work in gender centers, making sure they provide affirming messages and contribute to the inclusive environment promoted in the institution, but also to cultivating partnerships with faculty and other individuals who work on campus in the spaces that students frequent. Gender centers should be working to forge connections with faculty members across disciplines – and not just the disciplines that closely align with the feminist goals that the center intends to enact. Examples might include: working with faculty from the sciences, where women and queer individuals are underrepresented; working with criminal justice faculty on raising awareness of how the prison industrial complex impacts women and queer individuals; or working with music faculty to highlight queer and women composers. The ability for gender centers to expand their reach and, in turn, expand their feminist infusion in the institution is there – it just needs to be enacted.

Informational and sensitivity trainings with university employees can bolster material hope, creating additional support networks for students and ensuring that they are better understood in terms of their identities. Course instructors who are equipped to work with marginalized students will understand the struggles such students face both inside and outside of the classroom. The goal is never to lower academic expectations – it is to offer empathy when needed. As Ainley and Canaan (2005) write, “Critical hope requires that we listen to students so that we can work with them from where they are ‘at,’ recognizing challenges that limit their learning” (p. 445). Gender centers that connect with faculty and offer workshops and learning opportunities can facilitate this recognition of where students are “at.”

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have examined the histories of gender centers to contextualize their existence in societies that are often plagued by disparate and competing value systems. As spaces that can mediate tensions, we located gender centers within their milieus and cataloged their potential to foster students' critical hope. That was not before we addressed the prevailing myths that are perpetuated in our society broadly, however, such as the myth of meritocracy, and illustrated how such ideologies can be especially damaging to LGBTQ+ populations. Telling students to “work harder” or wait until “it gets better,” or to find models of those who have “made it,” only serve to re‐create false hopes. These duplicities further alienate students and do little to validate their perspectives and honor their pain.

Gender centers have the opportunity to cultivate critical hope, to address the shortcomings of dominant narratives, and to provide the support systems that students need to succeed in their academic and everyday lives. Through providing programming, tutoring, and scholarships, gender centers offer students material resources. Through offering services such as safe rides and policies that ensure students' correct names appear on identification cards, they enhance the safety of the individuals with whom they work. Finally, as a visible institution on campus, they validate the presence of LGBTQ+ communities and signal respect.

Creating and maintaining a gender center with a critical hope framework is not an easy feat, however. It requires constant vigilance to ensure that programming and conversations do not fall into false hope and that they respect the realities of the students they serve. Those who work in gender centers must engage in iterative reflection to ensure that their own perspectives, commitments, and actions are aligned with the mission of the center and that they are continuing to act on those values, serving as a model for students. These goals are achievable through the work seen in gender centers across the globe – but even more can be done to support the emotional, academic, and physical well‐being of marginalized students.

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Notes

  1. 1 In this chapter, we use LGBTQ+ to signify lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and other diverse sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions. We also use trans* to signify the gender‐non‐conforming community, because the asterisk provides a “visual disruption for readers” due to continued conflation between transgender and transsexual (Nicolazzo 2017, p. 8).
  2. 2 Chosen names are names that trans* individuals choose for themselves. Given names at birth are often referred to as dead names.
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