Camaraderie, shared victories, countless hours spent working together — many would agree these elements make a team. But according to Annika Chan, a captain of the Boston University women’s ultimate team, their team is “a family, first and foremost,” which happens to promote gender equality together.
Sixty players from the BU Lady and the Manly Ozone Pilots ultimate frisbee teams participated in a photo series called “I Need Feminism Because…” that was initially published as a photo album to their Facebook page on Nov. 15. Each black-and-white photograph features one player holding a frisbee with a handwritten note, which explain their personal connections with feminism.
The players’ responses included “I need feminism because sexual assault occurs on campuses without serious consequences,” “because my self-worth is not measured by whether men find me attractive” and “because I refuse to let my uterus be a political object,” to name only a few.
The idea for the photo series started with Apryl Hsu, a sophomore player on the Lady Ozone Pilots, who participated in a photo series for social justice in a feminist club in high school and decided to continue it at BU. The photos were not intended as a reaction to the election, she said, but rather a response to the “lack of morale post results” that permeated the BU campus.
“I feel like we really need this right now to show everyone: don’t give up on anything, not all hope is lost,” Hsu said in an interview with The Daily Free Press.
When Hsu brought the idea to Chan, the captain said she immediately recognized it as something aligned with the values of ultimate, a sport she said has a welcoming community and has long since strived for gender equality.
“Everyone came up with such valid responses that related to their daily lives … and what came out of it was this powerful message that equality is something that still needs to be achieved,” Hsu said. “And ultimate being a sport all about equality, it just seemed like the right thing to do to make this series.”
In the two weeks since the photo series was posted, the “I Need Feminism Because…” photo album has acquired more than 4,500 shares on Facebook. Individual photos have often have several hundreds of likes. The Bay Area Disc Association and Duke University’s women’s ultimate team, inspired by the Ozone Pilots’ album, also created their own photo series on the issue.
While most commenters on the Facebook album left positive sentiments, others remarks are less so. One comment read, “I don’t expect people to respect me just because I have a vagina.” On a post regarding the wage gap, a commenter wrote, “Women don’t make 33% less for the same work, stop making up bulls— that flies in the face of our established laws.”
The BU women’s ultimate team chose to ignore negative comments, focusing instead on the positivity that their photos yielded, the captain said.
“We’re a family, so we really just talked about it if it did bother us,” Chan said. “For the most part, a lot of us know that these [negative] comments are part of the minority of the population that’s been seeing this.”
Caeleigh Higgins, the vice president of the Lady Pilots team, said the team’s coaches, Casey Terp and Tracy Snyder, have been very supportive of the photo series.
“I think a lot of our girls are stronger just because we’ve had so much support from our team, but also our coaches believing in us so much,” Higgins said. “They were huge role models for a lot of us, especially the upperclassmen who’ve been with them for a while, making it a safe environment to show who you are but also stand up for what you believe in.”
Several team members expressed their encouragement for other sports and organizations to continue the “I Need Feminism Because…” thread and to speak up for their beliefs.
“I think there are a lot of misconceptions about feminism, and I’m hoping that the campaign gets people to start asking questions and learn more about gender equity issues in the United States in particular, but also globally,” Michaela Cushing-Daniels, the president of the Lady Pilots team, wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press. “I would love to see a change in the way people view feminism in the long run.”
Higgins called the series a “learning experience” for people to discover their relationship with feminism, despite negative connotations they may have heard about the word before. Hsu called it a “catalyst for conversation.”
“I can’t speak on behalf of the team, but I have a strong feeling that the majority of our team were feminists before I was,” Hsu said. “Everyone on this team has such a similar mindset. The people willing to do this kind of photo campaign, even if they didn’t think they were a feminist before, they sure are now.”
