hey international women's day
Mar. 8th, 2011 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhI've already been admonished on twitter to not make this about white upper-class cis-women (which, given that I'm neither white nor upper-class, I'm not sure how I could, but point taken, scolding accepted, I am duly chastened) so I thought I'd link you to this excellent Sojourner Truth quote I reblogged on tumblr.
As most of you who read this blog know, I've had a very rocky relationship with feminism this year, as I encountered it in its online form only recently and it really set me back on my heels. It's odd the way that online feminism does make me think a lot more about not being white--not that fandom itself doesn't, and not that, you know, the world we're living in doesn't, but feminism makes me think about it in very different ways than I usually do, like the way that being a biracial woman makes a lot of my assumptions about being a woman very very different. So here are some wishes from me about online feminism as I personally have experienced it.
I wish there was a way to talk about being a woman in the culture without replicating the fact that in this misogynist culture, women get status from how sexually desireable they are. I find a great deal of online feminism to be, to a certain extent, about a kind of performative desireability, which doesn't leave a lot of room for women that society doesn't find desireable--like many Spanish and black females, or Asian females who don't fit certain Orientalist stereotypes (or do), or women who don't have the right body type or who are no longer young--or who don't find themselves desired in their own lives. The media and just living our lives in the world can make us feel bad enough about not being desireable (or with aging, no longer being desireable); it's unfortunate that online feminism compounds this effect in such unthinking ways.
I wish that feminism didn't perpetuate the hierarchy of abuse:
sexual > physical > verbal/emotional
where the far left is what feminism is willing to step up and fight for, demand punishment for, while the far right might not even really be abuse, and we should think about the mothers being in a bad place. The middle, well, that depends on the victim all too often. It's definitely compounded my own reticence to talk about the extent of the abuse I experienced as a child; given that it's on the right side of the spectrum rather than the left, I doubt that it fits into the feminist paradigm.
I wish that the pro-choice movement hadn't allowed the anti-choice movement to make adoption into an anti-abortion issue. The extent to which I have seen pro-choice advocates put down adoption, and claim that all unwanted pregnancies should be terminated, and that any that were not were abortions that unfortunately didn't happen, was incredibly shocking to me. That people who seemed fairly mainstream were, on tumblr, reblogging an article that referred to a ten year old girl, who is living in the world, as the destruction of her mother's life--as an abortion that unfortunately didn't happen--is, to me, not just insensitive but destructive. I am not sure that noting how unwanted this girl is in a national publication is going to help abortion rights, not to mention that treating unwanted children as just so much trash is not all that kind to those of us who were the result of unwanted pregnancies--that is, all of us who were adopted. That one event has made me really question my pro-choice stance.
I wish that in the push to make the online feminist movement more diverse we didn't think in terms of numbers and quotas and along the same kinds of identity politics lines that can so often divide us. I've been in situations where someone says, "man, our group is too white!" and I always think, "okay, did they just forget I'm not white? Or am I just not non-white enough?" It's ... weirdly distancing. Diversity is about having lots of viewpoints, and absolutely having people from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of life experiences will diversify the conversation. But let's not make a fetish of it. Now, maybe that's easy for me to say, as I'm privileged in some ways but not in others, and often not in the ways that people are talking about when they talk about diversifying the online feminist conversation--hey, I grew up lower class, rural, around uneducated people, and I'm not white--but still, you know, race/class/cis/nationality/ability aren't the only axes. Even though there are lots of lesbians in the movement and always have been, I don't know that they are listened to quite enough--and certainly the push of online feminism away from the stereotype has served to mute those voices somewhat. And there's welcoming in voices of all ages, of all backgrounds--maybe even of talking to those women who see a model in Sarah Palin and trying to work out what they think is missing from feminism, what distances them from the movement, and not chalking it all up to their own internalized misogyny.
I'd say that these four issues are going to keep me pretty distant from online feminism for the forseeable future. Maybe I've just aged out of it; maybe I should have been engaged with it back in the 90s, when I was "in the demo." Maybe I'm just too moderate, too interested in shades of gray rather than dichotomies, to be able to interact with online feminism as it appears to exist now. (And that flow away from moderation is true of the internet in general, I'd argue.) Maybe if you're not Sady Doyle you really are s.o.l. I'm not sure. I don't have any answers here, unfortunately; only questions and wishes.
As most of you who read this blog know, I've had a very rocky relationship with feminism this year, as I encountered it in its online form only recently and it really set me back on my heels. It's odd the way that online feminism does make me think a lot more about not being white--not that fandom itself doesn't, and not that, you know, the world we're living in doesn't, but feminism makes me think about it in very different ways than I usually do, like the way that being a biracial woman makes a lot of my assumptions about being a woman very very different. So here are some wishes from me about online feminism as I personally have experienced it.
I wish there was a way to talk about being a woman in the culture without replicating the fact that in this misogynist culture, women get status from how sexually desireable they are. I find a great deal of online feminism to be, to a certain extent, about a kind of performative desireability, which doesn't leave a lot of room for women that society doesn't find desireable--like many Spanish and black females, or Asian females who don't fit certain Orientalist stereotypes (or do), or women who don't have the right body type or who are no longer young--or who don't find themselves desired in their own lives. The media and just living our lives in the world can make us feel bad enough about not being desireable (or with aging, no longer being desireable); it's unfortunate that online feminism compounds this effect in such unthinking ways.
I wish that feminism didn't perpetuate the hierarchy of abuse:
where the far left is what feminism is willing to step up and fight for, demand punishment for, while the far right might not even really be abuse, and we should think about the mothers being in a bad place. The middle, well, that depends on the victim all too often. It's definitely compounded my own reticence to talk about the extent of the abuse I experienced as a child; given that it's on the right side of the spectrum rather than the left, I doubt that it fits into the feminist paradigm.
I wish that the pro-choice movement hadn't allowed the anti-choice movement to make adoption into an anti-abortion issue. The extent to which I have seen pro-choice advocates put down adoption, and claim that all unwanted pregnancies should be terminated, and that any that were not were abortions that unfortunately didn't happen, was incredibly shocking to me. That people who seemed fairly mainstream were, on tumblr, reblogging an article that referred to a ten year old girl, who is living in the world, as the destruction of her mother's life--as an abortion that unfortunately didn't happen--is, to me, not just insensitive but destructive. I am not sure that noting how unwanted this girl is in a national publication is going to help abortion rights, not to mention that treating unwanted children as just so much trash is not all that kind to those of us who were the result of unwanted pregnancies--that is, all of us who were adopted. That one event has made me really question my pro-choice stance.
I wish that in the push to make the online feminist movement more diverse we didn't think in terms of numbers and quotas and along the same kinds of identity politics lines that can so often divide us. I've been in situations where someone says, "man, our group is too white!" and I always think, "okay, did they just forget I'm not white? Or am I just not non-white enough?" It's ... weirdly distancing. Diversity is about having lots of viewpoints, and absolutely having people from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of life experiences will diversify the conversation. But let's not make a fetish of it. Now, maybe that's easy for me to say, as I'm privileged in some ways but not in others, and often not in the ways that people are talking about when they talk about diversifying the online feminist conversation--hey, I grew up lower class, rural, around uneducated people, and I'm not white--but still, you know, race/class/cis/nationality/ability aren't the only axes. Even though there are lots of lesbians in the movement and always have been, I don't know that they are listened to quite enough--and certainly the push of online feminism away from the stereotype has served to mute those voices somewhat. And there's welcoming in voices of all ages, of all backgrounds--maybe even of talking to those women who see a model in Sarah Palin and trying to work out what they think is missing from feminism, what distances them from the movement, and not chalking it all up to their own internalized misogyny.
I'd say that these four issues are going to keep me pretty distant from online feminism for the forseeable future. Maybe I've just aged out of it; maybe I should have been engaged with it back in the 90s, when I was "in the demo." Maybe I'm just too moderate, too interested in shades of gray rather than dichotomies, to be able to interact with online feminism as it appears to exist now. (And that flow away from moderation is true of the internet in general, I'd argue.) Maybe if you're not Sady Doyle you really are s.o.l. I'm not sure. I don't have any answers here, unfortunately; only questions and wishes.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 04:24 am (UTC)2. I have your comment from your RPF meta post sitting in my inbox and I am definitely going to reply to it.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 06:39 am (UTC)In particular a quote from another commenter of color on a mainstream feminist blog:
I'm finding your term "performative desirability" particuarly resonant. I hadn't been able to articulate what was bugging me about that type of thing, and it's exactly this. It's extremely alienating to anyone who isn't, well, all of the block-quoted above.
Even in the fatosphere, where there's a radically different sense of what gets to count as desirable, and disability and age and class aren't automatic disqualifiers either, there is still not as diverse a representation of well-known voices from fatties of color. There's more than what I've seen in a lot of mainstream feminism, I think mainly because fat folks are often marginalized on more than just weight and are marginalized enough to be more open to being told about other groups' issues. But there's also a segment who think that because Sir Mixalot likes big butts, there's no fatphobia in black culture, which is a complete lie.
And the fat feminist bloggers who get noticed by the mainstream fit most of the necessary checkboxes except for being fat. I admire and am friends with several of those folks, and I do think thy "get it" in a way a lot of the mainstream of mainstream online feminism doesn't. But it's those voices that the rest of the culture picks out as worth listening to, and it's the same conundrum of what to do when the choice is to have someone be a token for the whole community and make broad swaths of that community invisible, or to have that community not at the table at all.
I'm actually more encouraged by some segments of fandom where there's at least commitment and intention towards analyzing feminism in the broader context, and conversations at, say, Laughing Medusa, have been pretty good. Even if lots of the membership is, as far as I can tell, folks who might well fit that mainstream elite of online feminism demographic - they at least want to be allies. But sometimes I just want to opt out of the whole damn everything entirely, rather than have to work so hard to push so little.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 04:42 pm (UTC)What shocks me about that list is how much it actually doesn't describe me aside from the race part. I do often think about how class affects my life and I think my class origins get erased by the life I'm living now and my education, but actually, the fact that I'm from relatively poor rural stock affects my life. When I was out of work and couldn't get onto unemployment right away (you can't file in the summer if your most recent job was teaching) I needed to get some money from my mother, and she could help me for a couple of months, but no longer than that. Yet, I have many friends whose parents helped them buy their first house/condo. My parents could never have helped me on that kind of scale; I went to Radcliffe, yes, but on scholarships that I worked very hard to get. I know intelligence is a privilege of its own, but still, it doesn't erase the advantages that my friends who came from money have that I still don't have, when all of my funds have to come from my own toil and not from investments that my parents put in my name.
It's funny; I feel like people treat me as though I am all of the things in that paragraph, or expect me to be, or talk to me as though I am. But I'm really, really not, and not just because I'm not white.
I think that's why I got so annoyed by that tweet that went around about how we should all make sure to talk about lots of different movements or whatever; I was annoyed that they assumed that I wouldn't without being reminded to do so, and I was also annoyed that they assumed that I am a white, upper class, cis-gendered female in the first place. I mean, if I'm on twitter then clearly I must be!
I dig what you say about the fatosphere. I think that often happens, that you can differ from the established "norm" on one axis only, and then you have to be the spokesperson for that one axis. That's why intersectionality is so incredibly difficult: each axis of difference pushes you away from the center because you're too different, and also, then you'd have to be there talking about more than one thing. Because of course the only reason to have diverse voices is so the voices of diversity talk about their diversity, as opposed to that diverse voice also having something to say about, you know, butterscotch pudding. As Latoya noted in her post.
Working so hard to push so little indeed. It just makes me want to go back to teaching, where I'm doing a thing, and it makes a difference, albeit a small one. We can't all make huge differences.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 05:36 pm (UTC)While I do not want to hop up on an elitist white tower academic feminist horse, I often see online feminism reinventing the wheel in ways that are exhausting and counterproductive to actual dialogue. At the end of the day, I don't need to label my own spiritual practice/ethos (because for me, feminism is that) to do what I do. Compassion, listening, and support (not "help") should come first. What is compassionate about calling a ten year old girl the ~end~ of her mother's life? A friend of mine recently, as she says, quit feminism when a pro-choice group kicked her out because they were not interested in discussing how abortion and the eugenics movement have been intertwined. (Abortions are great, let's make sure all the poor ladies with unplanned pregnancies can have them!) I don't even have words, yo.
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 06:34 pm (UTC)I would say that often compassion, in particular, is not only not valued but is denigrated. You know, all those "don't tell me to be nice" conversations have ended up with people thinking that compassion is weakness. Which is unfortunate. Sometimes I'll be somewhere saying a thing and people will be surprised and say that I'm very empathetic, and I'm like, well, yes? Isn't that how we can come together?
It was very interesting to read, via the Racialicious post that
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2011-03-13 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-15 04:54 pm (UTC)Professional feminism might have been a more accurate way to talk about this, though actually what I'm reacting to is likely the way that people pass around links (and ontd)_f is really not professional).
Thanks for the follow. Most of what actually happens around here is fannish ridiculousness, and I'm about to go into this huge thing called Color War where everyone just votes on their favorite color for a few weeks, but I hope I prove entertaining!