The Ideological “Outsider Within”

 

The “Outsider Within” posed by Collins is a very crucial and remarkable concept for marginalized people. Someone has been living in a space away from home, probably acquainted with its rules and norms, but never actually feels like they belong here. This person is an outsider within. Just like me. As an international student at Kenyon who grew up in China, I attend the same classes and go to Peirce for food just like people around me, but I’ve never felt like I really belong in this country. Nor have I ever been able to understand and experience the environment and social events like native students do, for the way I look at things in America is always shaped and filtered by my knowledge and perceptions of growing up in China. I’m using my experience as an international student at Kenyon as an example to demonstrate what an outsider within looks like for Collins and my focus in this blog will be on my experience as an outsider within in another place—my workplace in China during my gap years. My co-workers had exactly the same economic, educational, and racial backgrounds; we were of similar ages. Collins refers to race, gender, and class in structuring her concept of the outsider within. As a result, it seems intuitional that I was definitely an insider in my workplace, since I shared almost the same backgrounds with everyone else, but I was constantly feeling my position as the outsider within. Sometimes my co-workers could not even understand what I was saying, although our first language was all Mandarin. For example, in a regular meeting one day, our supervisor announced that every female employee would be responsible for wearing makeup during work time. I asked why this wasn’t the case for male employees in a very serious tone; everyone at the meeting burst into laughter, as if I was telling a joke. They didn’t even know what I was saying. The video I uploaded with this blog tells a story of a girl who gets up at 4 in the morning to do makeup and skincare in order to attract her crush at school. This dramatic and hyperbolic scene in the video can probably help walk you through the world I see as a feminist — if you’re not one already. There is nothing inherently wrong with makeup, but when it’s a requirement imposed on women, it becomes a type of sexist oppression. Unfortunately, this oppression is seen everywhere in reality. Our society relentlessly has high demands on women to always appear good and pleasant; decency in appearances is an important capital for women. Those women who don’t at least try to look good would be counted as failures, rebels to social norms, and thus unacceptable and undesirable. But my co-workers didn’t understand it. They took it for granted that women should wear makeup and appear appealing while men don’t have to. This was how they approached the world — through an angle that was clearly different from my feminist perspective. This is what made me the outsider within in my workplace. I was an outsider, ideologically. We believed in different things, so the worlds we saw through our eyes were distinct. But would you say the way I approached the world was less valid than theirs? Probably not. You might even think I am able to see things that they can’t which is a kind of strength in me, because it offers more diverse perspectives and sheds light on a more liberating environment for women. Maybe this is what Collins wants us to know through her work: some people are different from the majority in a space; they are seemingly the outsiders who are never able to completely fit in, but they carry valuable perspectives due to their unique positionality that deserve more attention and validation, both in academia and life.