On Feminism

Ok, so a comment I made on another blog sparked me to post on Feminism. It will actually take a series of posts, since feminism tends to be over-simplified and generally misunderstood. (AuntieHeathen - feel free to jump in and/or correct me where you disagree or feel I've missed something, as a fellow women's studies student. )

This is actually a lot more difficult than it sounds, as each school of thought could easily take an entire semester (or more) of college-level work to properly study.

When most people hear the term "feminist" they automatically think of the political activists. However, feminism includes much more than NOW and Ms. Magazine, and is often overlooked as a scholarly field with theoretical frameworks of its own that are just as complex as other social sciences. Feminist scholars come from a variety of academic backgrounds, and theoretical frameworks generally include many fields, including but no limited to sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, art, literature, political science, history, and linguistics.

Now, I know that Wikipedia has come under fire as of late, but when used intelligently and in combination with other resources, I find it quite helpful in this case. There is a very comprehensive section on feminism. If you take a look at the section entitled "Subtypes of feminism" you will begin to realize why mainstream understanding is so simplistic, as it tends to be with any subject with subtlety and nuance.

Under this heading are 29 different types of feminist activist and theoretical stances. There are quite a few I am not familiar with, and I won't even go into those. Now, many of these are not mutually exclusive and overlap with each other (third-world feminism overlaps with post-colonial feminism and Marxist feminism quite a bit), and very few feminist scholars place themselves securely into one single basket. For the purposes of this series of posts, I'll stick to what I know.

Generally speaking, feminism and gender theory focus on four main issues:

Gender: Gender is something often taken for granted as “already defined” by a lot of people, as seen in my gender post a few months ago. However, you’d be surprised to know that there are a great many theories regarding gender. What does it mean? where does it come from? Why does it even exist? For some, gender is defined through biology – men are masculine and women are feminine because of some biological factor that makes them different. Others lean toward post-structural theory, which says that gender is produced through our language and actions and does not exist outside of social relations. These are the theorists who argue the importance of language, and argue that since what we say and how we say it impact the way we view gender, that changing the language and actions can change the inequality of gender. It’s been easy for the Anti-PC movement to latch onto this group without realizing why they’re arguing that how we say things is important.

Experience: This concept is a little less concrete, but it has to do with exploration of the shared experiences of women as women. This is where the “sisters in struggle” and the universal definitions of what it means to be a woman came from. This is an important concept, because for the first time women’s personal experiences were being analyzed from a political point-of-view, rather than just being taken as isolated, individual situations. Many common themes were found to be shared in the way women were treated in public and in private. However, the problem with this concept is that it soon grew into a notion that there exists some “universal” trait that makes all women women. This is what was most contested by women of color and lesbian feminists.

"The Personal is Political": Related to Experience, the “personal is political” was a phrase coined by the second-wave feminists of the 1960s as a way to bring women’s supposedly “private” concerns into the public arena. Issues that were historically seen as private, including rape, domestic violence, familial relations, marriage, childrearing – were analyzed as having also political meaning. Marriage is a social institution which carries with it certain personal power relations between members of a family. How women were treated in marriage and why was now a political question and subject to analysis, rather than a private family matter.

Difference: This concept came later in the game, and directly challenges the concept of Experience and the universalist claims that all women are somehow essentially the same. This concept focuses on the intersection of identities (race, class, nation, location) and argues that the dominant group of women silenced other women to create the “typical” woman against whom others are normed. Black women, Chicana women, lesbians – they were all “Other” in relation to the white, middle-class, American woman.

This is already more than you wanted to know right? Too bad. You asked for it, and I’m not gonna skimp on this one. I want to do the different theories justice, so I’ll work on those, and leave you with a poem that sums up this last point:

I Ain’t the Right Kind of Feminist
by Cheryl L. West

First off, I’m too confused

Secondly you know my blackness envelops me

Thirdly my articulateness fails me

When the marching feminists come by

I walk with them for awhile

And then I trip over pebbles I didn’t see

My sexist heels are probably too high

I’m stuck in the sidewalk cracks

Oh where Oh where as my feminism gone…

Don’t you know it’s chasing after my

blackness

Somewhere in the white sea

I’m in the movement

No chile

I’m not talking about dancing

I’m in the liberation movement

Yeah I’m talking about the PLO

Yeah, I’m talking about South Africa and

apartheid

No I didn’t say you were fit to be tied

I am a woman

You are a lady

We are sisters in the movement

It’s about neapolitan ice cream

Mixed and oh so sweet

It’s not about white and sterility

Girl what are you talking about

I can have kids

My people have always had kids

No it’s about oppression of all oppresses

But they never come in peace

They just got some different labels

Tell me

Is sisterhood the same as 60’s

brotherhood

Oh where Oh where has my blackness

gone

Don’t you know its chasing after Ms.

feminism

Somewhere in the white sea

I belong to a consciousness raising group

I have rhetoric

I am a sociologist

I study race, pride, sex, class, humanity

I also make mention of all the “isms”

I am a feminist

Well I am a sister

I am fluid in the dozens

I study us

I study urban renewal

Which includes my bathroom roaches

And my kitchen mice

And the animals down at Public Aid

Tell me about the man that has filled my

belly

and ten others with babies

Come share with me sister feminist

Let us dance in the movement

Let my blackness catch your feminism

Let your oppression peek at mine

After all

I ain’t the right kind of feminist

I’m just a woman.

(c) 1983

That's all for now - we leave Thursday for Eagle River, Wisconsin (Ya Hey Der Mr. Santy Claus) for a quiet few days with my parents, sister and our puppy.