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Students and professors alike filled the Speaker’s Auditorium to hear her speak and while the auditorium buzzed with mild chatter before her talk, side conversations came to an immediate halt and interested ears instantly perked up when it was announced that the lecture would soon begin. Introductions were made by the Dean of Arts & Sciences, Lauren Adamson and a faculty member in art history, Susan Richmond. Guests were given more insight on the significant achievements made by Faludi. Not only was she a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, but she was also most recently a teacher, teaching at Harvard University.
Furthermore, we learned that she was not just any author because she focuses on feminism. She published 3 different novels focused on women and inequality, but also somewhat on men and inequality of gender roles as a whole. Her three novels, entitled Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, Stiffed: The Betrayal Against the American Man, and The Terror Dream are books that shaped themselves after her experiences writing for various publications intensely about feminism and the resistance against the movement.
With such noteworthy credentials, one could assume Faludi might have an ego. But one of the first sentences she says is “Hi. Can you all hear me? I can hear you but I can’t see you. It’s so dark in here.” That sentence alone set the tone for the remainder of the evening. The audience released a soft chuckle. It was impossible not to because of how shockingly humble her personality seemed to be.
Throughout her lecture were more variations of humor as she focused on topics ranging from a history of feminism and women as a whole to “the male gaze” and of “Losing Yourself in the 21st century”, an art exhibition that provoked thought because it is an art exhibition featuring works of several women artists exploring issues of identity and subjectivity in the 21st century. In the lecture she even prompted the thought that “perhaps feminist emancipation isn’t about finding oneself and is perhaps about finding yourself instead.” She also noted that the exhibit held a recurring theme of struggling to cope with loneliness. She even suggested that “the more we concentrate on the self, the more we seem to lose it.”
A popular topic of discussion was cyberfeminism, which can be described as a feminist community, philosophy, and set of practices concerned with feminism interactions with and in cyberspace. Many of the students attending found the spotlight on the subject to be interesting. Junior Candice Bates said “learning about the cyberfeminism, I never heard about that. So just learning about different aspects of feminism is really interesting.”
Faludi incorporated her past acknowledgement of the loneliness of the art she saw in the “Losing Yourself” exhibit to the way cyberfeminism also involves that struggle and that coping. At one point, she displayed an artist’s photo with a plethora of social networks shown on it: the artist’s YouTube page, her Facebook page, her Myspace page, etc. However, nothing is clickable. She makes a reference to a quote and says, “We have so many ways to connect with each other, but we are not connecting. There is no body. Only 1’s and 0’s.”
Her lecture was deeper than a lesson about feminism. At the end of the lecture, senior Jessie Kiehm said “I definitely think that on a greater issue from feminism or just women finding their own identities, an overall issue that did come up was just dealing with loneliness in this society of technology. It’s a really good point and that’s something that needs to be addressed.”
Faludi was an inspiring, passionate, and enlightening figure. Every word she had to say gripped the audience and had them yearning to learn more, even those who knew nothing about feminism or cyberfeminism or the feminine/male self of respective gender identities. She was a great speaker. The students and staff of Georgia State were very lucky to have her.
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