By: Raegan Boettcher '24
Art by: Clara Schreibman
Dear Ribbers,
I remember, with startling clarity, the time that I first engaged with Spare Rib. Picture this: January 2021, winter of my freshman year, I was back living in the town I grew up in, in a house that my cabin-fever-stricken family filled to the brim, driving each other up the walls during that first tumultuous year of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Everyone spent the first two weeks of Winter 2021 at home before coming to campus because of a nationwide post-holiday surge.) I scrolled through my inbox that overflowed with campus emails begging me to hop on to another Zoom meeting and trashed them all (because who the hell had the energy to attend another hour of awkward small talk with blank boxes and terrible internet connection?).
But, for some reason or another, the Spare Rib campus email caught my attention. Maybe it was the always-charming use of emojis, maybe it promised a space for writers or a space to talk about social justice, or maybe I was just feeling lonely and disconnected and needed something to hold onto for a moment.
I hopped on the Zoom that night, and we all debated the options for the next edition’s theme (we landed on Transition for the 21S edition — perhaps still my favorite edition of the zine, even if it is just because it was my beginning). Despite the inherent awkwardness of a Zoom meeting, I remember it being filled with laughter and light and love. It felt like something that could keep me afloat in a freshman year amidst a pandemic that no one could have anticipated — something good. I went to bed that night buzzing with possibilities, an article already spilling out from my head while I frantically jotted my jumbled thoughts down in my notes app for safe-keeping.
Now approaching the end, I sat down to write this letter with the primary concern of record-keeping. I wanted an organized place for me to write down all the thoughts that I still have floating around in my head, something better than ideas frantically jotted down in my notes app like I did that first time around almost four years ago.
In June, I’ll graduate, leaving the campus and the community that I have called home for the last four years. And for all of the institution’s faults and shortcomings and frustrating bureaucracies, I will forever be grateful for my time at Dartmouth because it connected me to all of you. That is something I will never regret.
Initially, I wanted this article to be a sweeping meta-analysis about the various factors that have contributed to the repeated devaluation of Spare Rib as an organization. More than that, I wanted to write about the necessity of planning for longevity in our movements, the importance of building a legacy, and how to give everyone the chance to think about politics in new ways.
I think I can still call this piece a meta-analysis. I try to communicate why it is so vital for us to understand longevity and legacy and to cultivate passion and joy for the work that we do. And I try to articulate why we can’t race along the tracks, without direction, perhaps off the edge of the cliff.
In the end, though, I think this article is more of a parting gift. This is a love letter and a goodbye, a how-to and what-not-to-do guide, an attempted list of things that I wish I knew when I started and an incomplete list of all the things that I have yet to learn — all wrapped up in one article, the last thing I will publish in Spare Rib. It’s a going-away gift, an attempt to bring together all the thoughts that I haven’t had the chance to put down until now. I do this all in the hopes that it will help someone one day; maybe it will help you to start thinking, to begin dreaming, or to hit the ground running. Maybe this will plant a seed for you now, and you’ll bloom so much larger for it.
I don’t have all the information or answers; I’d be lying if I said I did. But over the course of my college career, I spent a lot of time engaging in campus politics. And I’ve learned many lessons — not all on purpose and many not particularly enjoyable. But I learned nonetheless, and I consider that a win. (Apologies for being sardonic, but at this point, I feel as if I’ve earned the right.)
Social and political activism at Dartmouth is fundamentally different from other schools. Arguably, we are the wealthiest and whitest Ivy League college [1] with a reputation for being the most conservative, but we are also in the middle of rural New Hampshire with an already small undergraduate population and very few graduate students. The strategies that may benefit other college campuses do not always serve us well here. Organizing mass demonstrations on our campus is both difficult (because it’s often hard to get a “mass” of Dartmouth students mobilized in the first place) and frequently unnoticed (because we don’t have the same access to media attention that we see on urban campuses like Columbia in New York City). This means two things: 1. We have a higher barrier to mass political action than other campuses, and 2. We have to get a lot more creative.
This space for creativity is where, from my perspective, Spare Rib really shines.
Although it was not necessarily the original intention of the organization, over time, Spare Rib has developed into a space that values education and outreach. Conversations around event planning circulate around questions of how we make sure that everyone is on the same page: what is the barrier to entry? What might people need to know to engage with this topic? How can we open this up to people who have never engaged with Spare Rib before — or politics at all, for that matter?
Even in the first edition, Confinement from Fall 2020, you can see the roots of this educational orientation. The “Bare Bones” section consists of articles like “Culture 101: Appropriation” and “Sex and Gender 101: The Sex Spectrum” by Maanasi Shyno ’23, and “Woman or Womxn?” by Jamie Tatum ’23. The end of the edition includes a glossary with helpful definitions of terms and phrases that people may not have heard before, put together by Amber Bhutta ’23.
Maintaining this educational orientation and low barrier to entry has not always been easy. Several attempts over the last few years to invest in these efforts have included recruiting a “101” project lead to encourage and support introductory articles on complex topics (although this didn’t work very well for us, unfortunately) and most recently, Topical Tea Times, a new meeting structure in which we discuss a current issue to encourage political education and investment in the world around us. Topical Tea Times the past two terms have included a history and discussion of self-immolation after the death of Aaron Bushnell outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the role of political activism in academic institutions inspired by Robin Kelley’s article “Black Study, Black Struggle.”
Topical Tea Times emerged from a conversation about how we might engage more with timely political problems with a zine publication schedule that always puts us behind on a minimum three-month lag. This kind of conversation is also something that I think sets Spare Rib apart — the fundamental willingness to engage in ideological struggle, consider what is working and what isn’t, and come together to figure out a creative solution.
Earlier in the development of Spare Rib, we instituted Rib Talks, a termly staff meeting in which we did exactly that to formalize engagement in organizational criticism. Some of the Rib Talks topics included how we can encourage accountability in the zine creation process, ways to make Spare Rib a more inclusive space, and several attempts to write a manifesto to define our shared ideology.
The very first Rib Talks discussed the role of intersectionality in our politics, why it is important for us to be intersectional feminists, and how to reflect these ideals in our practice. It was an important conversation to have, although it was partially a reaction to the organization being labeled “White Rib” by other campus leftists at the time (which was both mostly inaccurate and very uncreative).
Intersectionality began as legal terminology, coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. Literally named for the place where streets cross, Crenshaw coined the term to illuminate how factors like race and gender can work together to compound discrimination in legal cases. The case that inspired the concept examined hiring discrimination against Black women. The company in the trial argued that their hiring history could not be considered unlawful discrimination because they had hired several other (white) women and several other Black (male) employees,[2] so Crenshaw had to consider how to elucidate the intersection of misogyny and racism. “Intersectionality” became a way to explain the unique experiences of Black women that fall outside of singular definitions of discrimination.
For Spare Rib, “intersectional” began as a modifier to distinguish our ideology from “white” feminism [3] and align us with more progressive forms of feminism that recognize multiple dimensions of oppression such as race, sexuality, class, etc. However, the extent to which intersectional feminism as a general ideology engages with each of these dimensions widely varies. In my experience, intersectionality often lacks recognition of class-based oppression entirely, focusing more on other oppressive forces without understanding the class dimensions that underpin them.
Furthermore, viewing oppression under an intersectional paradigm often leads people to treat marginalization as additive rather than understanding each mode of oppression as unique and context-dependent. Especially once bourgeois politics and academia adopted intersectionality into their institutional ideologies, it affirmed people’s investment in superficial identity politics that value “representation” in positions of power over more material analyses that understand power as a systemic problem of inequality and oppression. As Professor Ruha Benjamin from Princeton University so succinctly said in a speech at Spelman College: “Black faces in high places are not going to save us… Our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”[4]
Furthermore, having someone in power that is a woman, queer person, person of color, or previously working-class does not guarantee their continued allyship to progressive politics. (For a prime example, consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vote against the right to strike for railroad workers despite her public statements of support and her many other failures to maintain “socialist” politics.[5] Or consider Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the UN ambassador for the United States who infamously voted multiple times against UN resolutions for ceasefire in Palestine.) [6]
Several years down the line, Spare Rib has been floating the idea of changing our name, moving away from the “intersectional” label and dropping the “zine” part of our description to reflect our more general community orientation that has recently developed. We have considered changing our name to many things (“feminist collective,” “feminist zine,” “feminist cooperative,” etc.) but have thus far been unable to make a final decision.
Moving away from intersectionality would allow us to more directly consider and include other kinds of feminisms in our practices (Marxist-feminism, Black feminism, eco-feminism, etc.), especially because it is unlikely that every staff member considers themselves a specifically “intersectional” feminist. And besides, do we need to modify our assertion of feminist politics just because it has, at times, been used for only the concerns of wealthy, white women? Especially considering the issue of white-washing and lack of class analysis is not unique to feminist politics.
There is also the problem of moving away from this label in terms of campus optics. It might not look that great if we were to suddenly move away from calling ourselves “intersectional.” Sure, we could release some kind of statement or email explaining our choice, but many people ignore their emails (it’s okay… sometimes I do, too) and others simply unfairly engage with Spare Rib as an organization.
To give just one example, I remember hosting a workshop for the staff to update our Indigenous land acknowledgement when I was a writing lead during Spring 2022. The purpose of the event was to think about Spare Rib and our relationship to Indigenous issues and engage with the history of settler-colonialism at Dartmouth as a staff. I facilitated the meeting along with my co-writing lead at the time, but we were not experts by any means and made this clear. We focused the meeting on brainstorming as a staff; we looked at our previous land acknowledgement to identify what could be updated, removed, and added, understanding that it was not ever going to be perfect; our goal was organizational improvement, not perfection. However, some people assumed that Spare Rib was offering to workshop other organizations’ land acknowledgements — I suppose based on misinterpretations of the meeting title or unfair assumptions and preconceived notions about who we are as an organization.
Spare Rib has also received some superficial criticisms for several of our other characteristics, from our investment in art and poetry to our horizontal structure. For some reason, Spare Rib’s horizontal structure and consensus-based decision-making has made us into somewhat of an outsider amongst other parts of the “campus-left.”[7] We have garnered a reputation for being a myriad of things: too slow to make timely decisions, too invested in complicated “bureaucracy,” or ultimately too unserious to publish anything “besides art and poetry.” These misconceptions all reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how we operate. Furthermore, they expose that such criticism often arises from people who have never actually read our work, which is especially ironic when they come from people that tried writing more “serious” articles with us in the past but ultimately backed out.
Why have we received such a negative reputation for seemingly innocuous reasons? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question, so I’ll spoil it for you: it’s just misogyny. There are implicit assumptions that feminism is not useful as a political paradigm within left-wing movements (hilarious!) or that misogyny is somehow no longer a problem (how ironic!).
None of this is to say that Spare Rib is somehow perfect, above criticism, or better than any other student organization on campus, but I am trying to elucidate the problem of some people blindly criticizing us for things they do not truly understand.
Undergoing ideological struggle is a good thing. This is how we all become more politically developed, and this is how we build organizations that are meant to last. Remaining static within restrictive ideological frameworks and outdated methodologies helps no one. And, of course, there are valid criticisms to mention for horizontalism and consensus-based decisions that we should absolutely acknowledge. Admittedly, it is hard to be truly horizontal, given that logistically someone needs to be steering the direction of the organization and making sure things are getting done. Horizontalism proliferated in the U.S. around the time of the Occupy movements, a left-wing populist movement in the 2010s that started with Occupy Wall Street in 2011.[8] Many of the iterations of the Occupy movement, including Occupy Dartmouth, were vaguely anarchist and took a fairly reactionary stance against any kind of hierarchy.[9] Are we even truly horizontal with a leadership board that steers the direction and plan for the organization? Is horizontalism something we still want to strive for in the first place?
Regardless of how we answer those questions, it is not inherently bureaucratic to have a decision-making process. Without a formalized process for an organization to decide things, whether it be consensus-based models, democratic-centralism, single-choice voting, etc., decision-making can become a game of who can talk the most, the loudest, and over everybody else. (At a certain point, we might as well join the Senate with how often people recreate the filibuster.) It is true that consensus models are slower than individuals making executive decisions, but I don’t think speed or efficiency are important enough for us to sacrifice our fundamental values, especially when the so-called “inefficiency” of our consensus model typically adds only 24–36 hours to the response timeline.
Dartmouth students, in general, have a problem with the constant feeling of running out of time, mostly attributable to the sprint of the 10-week quarter. This chronic limit of time creates an unrepentant sense of urgency in every aspect of student life — from academics to socializing to campus politics. It becomes particularly salient for campus political organizations when faced with a short span of open time between the threat of midterms and finals combined with the pressure of the 24-hour news cycle. At many of the political organizing meetings I’ve attended at Dartmouth, there’s an unrepentant sense of urgency to respond immediately with direct action to any problems on campus or more broadly — often at the expense of student safety measures, deeper critical engagement, and basic human needs like sleep and food. Community care and safety is all too often left to the wayside.
Obstacles to establishing strong political foundations at Dartmouth are further exacerbated by the D-Plan. The D-Plan often feels evil, like premeditated murder to any effort at building a movement that lasts past a year. I maintain that it is evil, but it was hardly premeditated; it was a rushed solution from Dartmouth President John Kemeny to a housing crisis precipitated primarily by coeducation. According to the Office of the President, Kemeny “instituted the ‘Dartmouth Plan’ of year-round operations, thereby allowing a significant increase in the size of the student body without a corresponding increase in the College's physical facilities.”[10] (More than fifty years post-coeducation, very little has changed.)
Nonetheless, it is quite convenient for the administration to have an unstable student body for whom it is normal to be away from campus for up to year at a time. It is monumentally difficult to stay integrated in a struggle that you can hardly settle into before being thrown into your next off-term. How are new students supposed to learn from upperclassmen and previous struggles when we’re given so little time to occupy the same space?
I guess I’m trying to answer that question, too. I guess I’m trying to offer a word from me, someone who watched this space take root, to you, all the future ribbers who will lovingly tend to it and watch it grow even larger.
You will feel like you’re running out of time, like you’re sprinting to the finish. You will feel like you’re alone. Resist this feeling; resist this urge. It does not serve you, it does not serve your movements, and it will not carry you into the future.
All too often, sprinting ahead towards the edge of the cliff means leaving a lot of people behind in your wake. And a movement cannot survive on the efforts of one person, or even a few, alone. Our primary goals should always be to build up a community — a support network, a safety net to fall back on when things do not go as planned because inevitably, they will not. This is not by anyone’s fault, but simply by nature of us all being human and flawed. Our plans will undoubtedly fail, but that does not make us failures.
The goal is not to avoid failure; the goal is to have the means to recover from it. My hope, after I leave Spare Rib behind, is that you all will still give each other this support to recover. That, too, is something that makes this organization so important, so vital, so fulfilling.
Our network of people has spread so far in just the last four years. There are Ribbers from before me and there will be new Ribbers after whom I will never have the chance to meet, but we are all connected through this organization: this community of people who understand what it is like to love Spare Rib and, one day, have to leave it.
But the joy of all this is that we remain connected even after leaving campus.
No matter where my future takes me, I think that my politics will always have a fundamentally feminist orientation because feminism was my first homebase. Spare Rib will always be the organization and the community where I mark the start of my real political development. But the place that I am now, politically speaking, is much different from four years ago. At the end of my college career, I no longer have the need for Spare Rib like I did when I started. I am ready for new endeavors.
In the best way possible, I have outgrown Spare Rib.
This might be startling to consider. I would urge you to reject your gut reaction against this and hear me out. The goal of Spare Rib, whether we realize it or not, has always been to foster people’s development until they are ready to take the helm, and eventually so they can fly out on their own. Spare Rib is a unique space, an organization unlike any other that I have seen, and I will miss it like a limb, but it was never meant to be forever. And that’s not a bug; it’s a necessary feature.
You can start here with Spare Rib, or with feminism more generally. But you do not have to end here. (And, really, you won’t — these long four years pass so much faster than you think, take my word for it.) Our mission statement says this, too, albeit in different terms: we are proposing a different origin story. Where you go from there is up to you to explore.
I am so endlessly grateful to have been at Dartmouth at this moment in time. I am so thankful to have seen the new beginnings of Spare Rib and helped to foster its growth. And I am so happy that I am getting to leave Spare Rib at a time and place that feels right for me.
Let this organization be a place for you to grow — like a greenhouse that is warm and bright and nourishing. Let this community be the people to whom you can always return. Let this be a moment in your life full of learning and questioning and experimenting. Try anything, try everything, and use this to inform you in the future.
Now and forever, your community will be there to catch you when you fall.
All of my love,
Raegan
Endnotes
[1] This is slightly debatable and certainly fluctuates year-to-year, and there are some differences in how colleges publicly report their demographic make-up, so there’s no definitive take on the “whitest” and “wealthiest” Ivy. The other likely candidate, UPenn, claims 57% of ’27s are students of color and 20% are eligible for federal Pell grants. Taking a look at Dartmouth’s class profile for the ‘27s, 60% of ’27s are identified as white and only 17% are Pell grant-eligible.
[2] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-99, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039; Kimberle Crenshaw, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” October 2016, TED Video, https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality.
[3] Arizbeth Rojas, “Feminism in the 20th Century,” Spare Rib Intersectional Feminist Zine 2, no. 2, March 2022, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/feminism-in-the-20th-century, p. 57–60.
[4] Ruha Benjamin, “Spelman Convocation 2024,” April 2024, Outspoken Agency, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1VeVADlLh8&ab_channel=AutismFromTheInside.
[5] Freddie deBoer, “AOC Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now,” New York Magazine Intelligencer, July 5, 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html.
[6] Nadeen Ebrahim, “After vetoing three prior UN resolutions on Gaza, US sees its own ceasefire proposal rejected,” CNN World, March 22, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/22/middleeast/us-gaza-ceasefire-proposal-veto-intl/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc.
[7] I hesitate to refer to the “campus-left” as anything in material reality, as it typically boils down to the same few people making decisions on behalf of several different organizations, but it’s useful to talk about how we fit into campus politics more generally. Inclusion in this mythical “campus-left” is subject to change depending on how much you play along with others’ rigid expectations. Spare Rib’s inclusion in this group has fluctuated a lot, so here’s my advice: Work on what drives you, not what you think everyone else wants you to do. You’ll be much more fulfilled this way.
[8] Kristen de Groot, “Ten years later, examining the Occupy movement’s legacy,” Penn Today, December 13, 2021, https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/ten-years-later-examining-occupy-movements-legacy; Marina Sitrin, “Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements,” Dissent Magazine, Spring 2021, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements/.
[9] Madeline Zeiss, “Dartmouth, Preoccupied: The Scoop on Occupy Dartmouth,” The Dartmouth, November 3, 2011, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2011/11/dartmouth-preoccupied-the-scoop-on-occupy-dartmouth; Richard Yu, “Ivies jump on ‘Occupy’ bandwagon,” The Dartmouth, October 24, 2011, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2011/10/ivies-jump-on-occupy-bandwagon.
[10]“John G. Kemeny,” Office of the President, https://president.dartmouth.edu/people/john-g-kemeny.
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