This YouTube video is from Ingrid Nilsen, who is a popular YouTube personality, and has become more exploratory in the realms of politics and social issues in the recent years.
Ingrid publicly came out as a lesbian on her YouTube channel in June of 2015 to her large audience, and the entire Internet. More recently, she has been involved in the political realm more actively, shown in her interviewing of President Obama, attendance at the Democratic National Convention, and with the posting of this video focusing on gender equality and the issue of public restrooms. As stated in the video, she is now a UN Change Ambassador for Gender Equality. This video both discusses the topics of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and gender expression as well as the goals she identifies with public restrooms in the United States.
I find this video to be related to the topics we’ve discussed thus far in the course for several readings. Guided by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, I feel Ingrid’s video represents this topic by considering the ways that individual differences (in this instance, gender differences) can affect people, especially on an everyday scale, in ways that can be multiply discriminatory. Ingrid says herself that she wanted her work with not only this video, but her role in the UN’s Change Ambassador program, to be inclusive. I also found myself thinking back to Cohen’s piece that discusses queer theory. Most specifically, I found myself reflecting on her discussion of binaries in society (for Cohen, this is most strikingly “straight” or “queer”, but other commonly understood binaries include “male/female”) and how they can be harmful within the issue of intersectionality.
I find Ingrid’s video to confront this piece head- on with her discussion of inclusive feminism—one that she self-describes as being cognizant and supportive of the disadvantages of those who carry different, often marginalized identities (here, those who don’t identify with gendered signage of restrooms are confronting issues of privacy). Her video is educational, progressive, and discusses things that many “beauty vloggers” on YouTube may not often address to their audiences.
