What My Feminist Agenda Looks Like
After wading through the 300+ comments on yesterday’s controversial Feministe post, I did some thinking about what my own feminist agenda consists of. When you identify so strongly with movement, it can be very hurtful to hear someone say “Fuck it!” in response. But I didn’t get offended because I saw where the writer, Maia, was coming from. Mainstream feminism, particularly the second-wave, has a tendency to treat women as a class in themselves without any regard for the fact that they are differentiated by race, class, sexual orientation, ethnic and national origin, etc. Take for example the issue of the glass ceiling, which has dominated mainstream feminist discourse for decades. What do poor women care about an extra woman CEO or two? Doesn’t that just mean that now there’s a woman in charge of organizing the exploitation of those less well-off? Gender equality does not always equate to progress, not when it serves only to benefit those who are already at the top.
One of you guys commented on my follow-up entry (“Why Saying ‘Fuck Feminism’ Can Be Productive”) with this:
You have no proof that our feminist sisters in history were “racist, classist, and ethnocentric.” They simply couldn’t - and shouldn’t have been expected to - fight every single battle. They fought on behalf of WOMEN, without any attempt to exclude particular groups of women. They can’t fight for women AND for all socioeconomic ills at the same time. You can only tackle one agenda at a time. A good life lesson in general.
I’m not going to regurgitate all of Women’s Studies 101 here, but the third-wave arose from the fact that many women felt excluded or even thrown under the bus by second-wavers. The struggle for contraception and reproductive rights allowed White women to choose to not have babies, while their minority counterparts found themselves having to defend their right to motherhood (see: forced sterilization, the purposeful placement of abortion clinics in “urban” neighborhoods, etc.). Mainstream feminists were considerably less concerned with the racist implications of arguments like, “Abortion reduces crime and encourages social stability.” The history of homophobia within feminism is pretty well accounted for (see: Lavender Menace and everything Germaine Greer has ever written about transwomen). And let’s not even get into issues like female genital circumcision, which Western feminists can cry outrage at, all while ignoring the part we play in causing poverty abroad — a far more pressing issue confronting women in the Third World.
I reject the argument that feminists can’t fight for women and for poor, queer, disabled, and non-White people. Because guess what? Many women are poor, queer, disabled, and non-White. For them, being part of the latter means many more disadvantages and much more discrimination than just being a woman. A feminist agenda has to recognize that women are not simply all oppressed in the exact same way because they share a gender. A feminist agenda has to recognize that some women are oppressors themselves, that the advancement of some women may come at others’ expense, that gender oppression is particularly damaging for women who are already disadvantaged in other ways, that these disadvantages are not side concerns but of primary importance. A feminist agenda only concerned with “women” as an abstract class of people is not a feminist agenda I can stand behind.
