Big Feminist On Campus

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Who made your banner? It's hella creative!

Thank you! A graphic design student here named Tristan Dubin. It was my conceptual idea, but he made it work better than I possibly could have.

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Meet Steph, a passionate radical feminist and active member of the Purchase College community.

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A first-semester senior in the drawing and painting major at Purchase College, Emma St. Jacques spends almost all her free time in the Visual Arts building honing her craft. In a sense, however, she never truly leaves the mentality she has there. Even bedroom is reminiscent of her studio, filled with macabre self-portraits and renderings of the female form in charcoal, oil paint, and water colors. Much of her work emphasizes high contrast, and she typically works in black and white or glaring neon colors. Even her body is an art gallery of sorts, housing six tattoos and fifteen piercings.

"My artwork explores themes of PTSD and trauma through realistic and accessible situations," says the 21-year-old. "I often photograph my roommates doing mundane tasks or acting out feelings like when you just want to go home and cry and stuff your face with chocolate and never get up off the floor." Raised by her artist grandmother and a fan of anime from an early age, she has art running through her blood. Prior to coming to Purchase, St. Jacques received her cosmetology license in high school before becoming an art major at Buffalo State University. At the end of her sophomore year, the Bethlehem, NY native transferred to Purchase, where she feels glad to be inspired by talented female teachers. In the future, she hopes to work on graphic novels as an illustrator.

As far as her moral philosophy goes, St. Jacques tends to consider herself more of an equalist than a feminist, in keeping with her vegetarianism and love for the environment. Even still, she has found that most of her work deals with feminist topics and utilizes female bodies. 

"Pretty much all of [my art features] women because I'm a woman and I feel like that's how I relate most," she says, looking up at the skeleton depiction of Marilyn Monroe hanging above her bed. "There's a common struggle with being a woman that men don't really have."

As far as the struggle for women artists in particular goes, St. Jacques maintains that she is lucky to be working at a time where women even have a chance to express themselves in this way.

"Looking back through history, there was a primarily male influence," she says. "Women artists can do anything now and cover any topic whether it be feminism or otherwise."

Sitting on the floor with her sketchbook in hand, St. Jacques works on a sketch of one of her roommates dressed a zombie. "This is my life as a woman, these are my experiences, this is what I've seen," she says.

(Emma dressed as a zombie for Zombie Prom, having used her cosmetology know-how to create a gruesome look.)

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Big Feminist on Campus presents Toni Wilson, Vice President of O.A.P.IA. and Diversity Programmer at Student Life. Here, she speaks with Big Feminist on Campus about her personal views on feminism and the ways she works to share her beliefs with the campus community.

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Sometimes people are like, "Oh, you’ve got a girl drummer, sick," and I’m conflicted because it’s cool, but a lot of that comes from the aesthetic, "Oh cool, sexy girl drummer," but it’s also like no, she’s a really good drummer. A lot of quote unquote men’s rights activists would say I’m being biased or whatever, but I would rather employ or get the help of women artists because they realistically don’t get as many opportunities as men. I want to be one of those people who prefer women or choose women over men because the system is rigged to choose men.

Mitski, on having classical composition major Kayla Cashetta as her drummer and opportunities for women artists in the industry

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Recent Purchase grad Mitski opens up about feminism's role in her life and music.

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Being the only woman in my band is actually pretty hard sometimes. As much as it's fun and it's entertaining and we get along, there's times where I feel very alone and very picked on and just not taken seriously. But that's something that I choose to fight and choose to ignore. Honestly… I just assume… that it's coming from a place that they can't help, assume that it's been ingrained in them to disrespect women and not even know that they're doing it, and to be strong about it and just continue what I'm doing... I think we can beat this whole system by doing what we love, doing it well, and not complaining about it in the process.

Angelina Torreano of Citris

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Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Angelina Torreano of Purchase-based alternative rock band Citris to listen to her play her new song and discuss feminism's place in the music industry. "I write about my experiences and inherently they're all… about the dynamic of women and men in a male-dominated world," said the twenty-one year old singer and songwriter. 

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I think the word is very powerful. It's one of my favorite things. When I hear someone's a feminist, I'm very excited. Even if they don't match up with all my feminist ideals, I think it's important to even just declare yourself to be a feminist, because it's still such a stigmatized word and to apply it to yourself with positivity is still a very political notion. I just… I love it.

Allison Hart (Features Editor of The Purchase Beat) on feminism

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Allison Hart:  Journalism major+Arts Management minor, Reviews Editor of The Beat, Creator of "Girl Cereal," Feminist.

      In her first year of attending school at Purchase, Hart chose to tackle the issue of sexism at The Stood, eliciting an unprecedented amount of response- some of which was critical.

"It was a really good learning experience," she said of writing Women in Whitsons. "It was like I went from reviews... to applying my opinion to a larger issue. I was worried mostly that no one would care, but people did care… it generated a big response and I was really happy with that."   

Since joining Purchase's music and arts magazine last year, Hart has become a fixture in the scene. For Hart, with her initial exposure to feminism being the music of Le Tigre and Bikini Kill as an eight-year-old, her love of both feminism and music have always been intertwined. Now serving as Reviews Editor of The Beat, she aims to continue applying her feminist ideals to the work she and her staffers create.

"I try to make sure that if a band did something sexist or had sexist lyrics I didn't just let them skate by with that," she says.

In The Beat's upcoming print issue, Hart made sure that she used her platform to give coverage to talented performers regardless of their gender identity, featuring one genderqueer musician. 

"I think that's important because I don't see a lot of queer musicians at all at Purchase, which is very weird to me. We have such a strong queer community and such a strong music community that those should mix more than they do. So next year… I want to cover that strongly. That's my next project, basically."

A bisexual woman and artist herself, Hart is also the creator of a feminist zine entitled "Girl Ceral," which she describes as "an outlet for collage based art and writing and me exploring ideas about myself and relationships and feminism and listing my grievances with different social experiences I've had."

"I try to make them very fun, though, with cartoons and bright colors 'cause I don't want it just to be this dark, unpleasant vibe even though it's sometimes like, 'Ugh, fuck this!' Sometimes it's kind of happy and fun to say 'fuck this' to things that you hate," she says with a smile. 

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I think I've been really adamant about my queer activism, being the first queer president it's kind of in my duty, I suppose. Queer and feminism at this point have such an overlap. [I care about] really changing the narrative around trans men on this campus, most of whom are gone, but they really have been trans misogynist and really degrading to women, so being able to be like, "No, that's not OK, you can be trans and a feminist. It actually makes more sense than being tans and not a feminist."

Derek Gaskill, PSGA President

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Derek Gaskill: Gender Studies/Cinema Studies major + Political science minor, PSGA President, FORTH member, Feminist.

     As one of the most active feminists on campus, Gaskill aims to use his position as "the first queer president [of the PSGA]" to rally for queer activism and begin a discourse on updating the campus sexual assault policy. 

"I think growing up female-bodied but masculine identified and then becoming male identified, it was hard because you hear the backlash of the word feminist, you associate it with man-hating, long armpit hair, whatever, all the stereotypes," says the 21-year-old. "I was really against the word feminist; I'd always say I was a humanist and I believed in equal rights...not knowing that that was the definition of feminism."  

After becoming involved with fellow queer identifying youth, Gaskill transferred to Purchase as a sophomore, joined FORTH (the feminist organization on campus,) and began taking Gender Studies classes. It was both a culture shock and learning experience on privilege; one he has fully embraced. 

"Attending Purchase has made me realize that I am in idiot--in the best way possible," he says with a laugh. "You grow up in a society that's so against women, it's so ingrained in our culture, and then here people call you out on everything in the best way. To this day… I still get called out all the time."

Such lessons have proved instrumental in his approach to editing the school's sexual assault policy, a priority he announced in his introductory campus-wide e-mail. His first steps towards this goal was to create an informal committee of students on the topic.

"As much as I'm a feminist, I'm also a very privileged white guy," says Gaskill. "Talking to the students and getting as many perspectives as possible has really helped me."

While efforts on this endeavor have been stalled by administrative offices that are seemingly too busy to make the changes he feels necessary, Gaskill maintains his resolve and says he may create a resolution with the student senate to further progress.

"This is serious, we want this done," he says authoritatively, leaning forward at the conference table in the PSGA office. "If things are still perpetuating and people are still having problems with this, then when is a good time?"