Barbelith Underground > Conversation

07:53 / 25.04.07

I’m still not entirely following you – I get that you want a third option but I’m not sure what that would look like. Do you want to define feminism more rigorously, or get rid of it as a concept?

The latter I think I covered above – many strands of feminism have shifted away from gender essentialism and are interrogating the very idea of gender grouping itself. I’m happy for that to happen as long as it is a result of saying ‘right, we have gone absolutely as far as we can with this concept and it’s hampering us. We retain our commitment to seeing if gender is fucking up people generally termed “women”, but we’re going to do that without re-essentialising them as “women”.’

The latter – defining feminism properly so we can all get cracking the central tasks - I don’t think is possible, or even desirable.
You say:
The best we can do under them is achievable when we're all agreed on a basic uniting factor and work to achieving that first, and getting on with the rest of the things we differ on afterwards.

Well, not really. Because feminism is huge. It contains many different impulses and approaches. It’s not a political party, it’s an umbrella term. It would be less like trying to assemble a Blue Party, and more like trying to get everyone who uses the word ‘decent’ to jointly decide what that means.
The idea of trying to define core issues in feminism has come up over and over, and it usually leads to the people with the most time and voice dominating the political agenda. For example, lesbians in the late 1960s were told that the newly emerging Women’s Movement had to concentrate on ‘core issues’ until it was more established, and could then move onto ‘fringe’ issues like sex between women. This just meant that the movement worked on issues such as contraception and abortion access, and expected the lesbians to chip in on working towards them (though less affected by them) until a lot of lesbians got ticked off (see The Lavender Menace invading the stage at the Second Congress to Unite Women and presenting ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’, to try to demonstrate that avoiding lesbian issues was inherently limiting to the movement).

Gender is not the same everywhere, and it’s not the same in all times and places and social contexts. So I would expect it to have widely differing priorities in different situations. It would be a lot easier to discuss if it was a unitary stance, but it would be a lot less effective.

And again, I’m afraid I don’t really recognize this description of feminism:
And if feminism isn't about female supremacy, it's definitely, by putting a focus right on 'fem' a female specialization, especially in the class French schools of considering/blocking-out femininity. It's about gender specialization, and that's either to put both in the mix together, male and female, or, as is the tendency with specialization schools (racial, religious, nationalistic), it moves towards a polarizing and value judgements as to where a special treament is implied for X, another required for Y.

Like I said, it’s a broad church, so it’s perfectly possible I’ve missed it, but I would say that mostly it’s had an absolutely anti-polarising view. It’s very easy to look at the culture today and say ‘There are no ostensible signs of gender differentiation – the feminists are the ones talking about gender, they must be the last bastion of gender polarization and assigning values to genders!’ It’s particularly easy to say that if you don’t have much contact with any feminist thought, writing or activism, as they’re often the people pointing out the inherently polarized gendered stuff that runs right through society like the lettering in a stick of Brighton rock. It’s totally untrue. Gender polarization exists. As a feminist, I challenge it.
That’s not the whole story – it annoys me as well when people say ‘Feminism does X’ or ‘Feminism does Y’ – so I’ll add that there’s at least one strand of Western feminist thought – cultural feminism – which does try to understand what women’s culture would particularly be like, how women would tend to live and organize if not affected by chaps. It’s a school that’s often accused of gender essentialism, although most of its practitioners are discussing social as much as biological factors. I know a lot of feminists, I hang around at a lot of those cool feminist night-spots and drinking dens, and I have never really met anyone who presented themselves solely as a cultural feminist. I don’t mean to generalize, and I know that places like the Michigan Women’s Music Festival tend to be a lot more invested in ‘women’s culture’, but it’s not something I run across often. (What I meet far more often is people who insist that men and women are very different, and who are in no ways feminists, or even anti-sexist.)

Also, as you note, French feminists such as Irigaray and Cixous and Kristeva (are these the 'class Fench schools' you're thinking of?) discuss femininity and what it consists of, often. But again, that's a complex approach - sometimes Irigaray's stuff on lady parts ("This Sex Which I Not One") is seen as biological essentialism, often it's held up as an expressive metaphor for something that's basically a theory of epistemology - how chaps and ladies tend to organise their perspectives and knowledges. They're often interrogating the psychoanalytic basis for gender identity itself - not very essentialist. Kristeva never got involved in French feminism as a polticial movement. Cixous and Kristeva stated openly that they were not feminists, and De Beauvoir distanced herself from feminism as a movement because she saw it as limited in scope nad class biased. I think it's partly in the adoption of some of their writings in Anglo-American feminism, particualrly in academia, that they've been defined as 'French feminists'. PM me for cites if useful.

You mention ‘brown power’ – is this the Mexican-American movement? I'm afraid I don't know much about it, as my sources are limited and I'm in the UK. Thus I don't know whether it is actually polarising race and ethnicity, or if it's being presented in that way because any attempt on the part of ethnic groups to cohere against racism is presented as self-limiting and self-defeating.

I do know a small amount about various other movements for protecting the rights of Mexican-Americans. I don’t see why pointing out how Mexican-Americans are being differently treated because of their race/ethnicity should be inherently polarizing. What you choose to do about that observation might be.

Are you, at root, concerned that any group that investigates its own social existence will end up advocating some kind of special treatment for itself, or even affirmative action, because historically I’m not sure that’s the case – there’s a big tradition of such groups asking for equal treatment, and to no longer be treated a certain way on the basis of their group-status.

Feminism 101