The whole “This is a feminist issue” thing: I’ve been thinking a little bit more about what feminism means to me and how it’s different from how other people see it.
Here’s the thing. I’m a feminist who blogs. I don’t call myself a “feminist blogger” in part because I want to blog about other things that are separate or only peripherally connected with feminism. And so I have tags. If it’s not feminism, it doesn’t get tagged “Feminism.” That way, I don’t have to make everything I talk about a “feminist issue” simply because 1) I care about it, and 2) me, a feminist, is talking about it. These two things are not enough to make something a feminist issue. Feminism has to actually be about and for women.
Not everything you care about has to be a feminist issue just because you’re a feminist.
I’m an atheist, anti-religion (particularly anti-Islam) and I have lots of personal/emotional baggage which I process through writing. And I love cats. This blog reflects all that, in addition to my feminist beliefs. (And no, if you were wondering, cats are not a feminist issue either.)
Feminists can be, and are, very interested in race issues as well. There are feminists who make their primary focus environmental work. There are feminists who are primarily animals rights activists. And that’s okay. A lot of this work is financially unrewarded and we have to make time for it after we’re done with full-time jobs we’re trying to hold down to pay the rent. It has to be personally meaningful or we wouldn’t be wasting our precious free time. Women’s issues is what gets me most fired up as far as activism goes (I don’t do anti-religious activism). If you are a feminist and you get fired up by social justice issues in general, write a generic blog with a variety of tags. Sometimes you write about feminist issues, other times you write about politics, or whatever else strikes your fancy.
It is not necessary either to specialize or to dilute one particular label.
But if you have a blog called “Feministing” and you have a weekly feminist round-up, please stick to feminism. A blog like Feministing is not one blogger’s personal space to explore everything that pops into the contributor’s head. There can be “mental health breaks” with funny YouTube videos and such, but not feminism-breaks venturing into entirely unrelated territory. If you’re specializing, then specialize, damn it. If you don’t think feminism deserves an uncompromised space all by itself, then don’t call yourself Feministing. If you want to be a political blogger or a social justice blogger, your model should be Pandagon or Shakespeare’s Sister. Feministing is a feminist blog. That’s how YOU defined it. Don’t compromise your own ideals and don’t compromise feminism.
Feminism should be about women.
Everything else has its own label.
And it’s important to keep the labels distinct because that’s why feminism was invented. “Man’s” inalienable rights did not include women. “Human” rights has not traditionally included women because women are not necessarily seen as human. Religions giving communities dignity and centering force has not included women. We needed our own club. We still need it. If you bring my race into feminism and start talking about my asshole brother’s right to stay in this country (he’s an immigrant of less certain status than I), guess what? The feminist arena, my safest safe space, my only refuge from the enemies of my very life, has been compromised.
This is, for the first time in my life, about me. Not my brother, who got an American education while I starved myself in a cell-like apartment in Saudi Arabia, under my parents’ thumb. This is, for the first time in my life, about me. Not my father. Not my son.
They are oppressed brown men, but guess who they got to oppress in turn? Me. And I left, clutching the sacred ideas of my (western) feminist fore-mothers to my chest. I love my male relatives, but they didn’t value my life and they didn’t create a club for me. I care about their rights, but feminism is about me — they get to play in all other areas. This, cordoned off, is about me, my body, my rights, my emotions, my needs.
Feminism is my refuge. Don’t make this, like everything else, about my brother.
Filed under: Feminism
hi , truely you are right .men always like to male and never treat women as human.
Zing!
I also grew up in a family where food was taken out of my mouth in order to support my brother. It is the reason why I feel so strongly about feminist issues. I have suffered the brutality that is tradition and male-favouritism and I cannot abandon others who have suffered abuse from men.
I know how hard it is to come from a super-traditional, “religious” and hypocritical community, so yeah. It’s not about our brother’s, it’s about us needing to be human.
[...] solid post. Feminists believe that women should be equal to men. Period. Full stop. I also read a post by the Apostate explaining why some things are not feminist issues, particularly in reference to Holly’s post [...]
Wow.
This is such a powerful post.
I haven’t read that Feministe post but I admit the title alone has me scratching my head. What’s wrong with calling the shooting racist, a hate crime, etc?
Now, in fairness, I’ll have to go read it to find out what she’s getting at. Darn it! I’ve been purposefully avoiding it (and a couple of others) since the Primary got underway. I have no stomach right now for feminists who allow or encourage Hillary Clinton bashing in their threads.
Apostate, you rocked it out of the ball park!
I’m a WOC, from a very strict Latino Catholic family, (my mother has a poster of John Paul II in her room!) and although I am not Muslim, I can relate to the male-dominance in both our cultures.
I am the oldest only girl and I have 2 brothers. My only role since I can remember was not to succeed in school (which I did anyway) but to take care OF THE BOYS. There never was a day until I left home where I haven’t helped clean, cook, do laundry, help with homework, just basically everything to help “the boys.”
BFP made a lot of these culturally relevant points and I am so happy you are as well, keep up the great writing & sved your blog on my Favorites list!
Neptuna, thanks and welcome (that includes the other new readers too!)
Catholics and Muslims have a lot in common so I’m not surprised that you see parallels in our situations!
I did go and read the Feministe post.
Jill certainly does go out of her way in her attempts to recast this as a feminist issue. I still define this shooting as a racist act and a hate crime, etc.
Oh, and the jokes on me–there was a Hillary bashing post right in the comments! I’m not kidding; it’s comment number 7.
Regarding the personal stories above: thanks everyone for sharing them.
I’m extraordinarily fortunate. My mother came of age just before the second wave and she never had the chance to live the life she wanted, but she certainly wanted her daughters to have it. My father’s old-school Italian, very paternalistic, (still is) but never put us down and always wanted the best for us.
I think I benefited by not having brothers, too. I was stunned by the experiences of my peers in Jr. High and High School. Girls whose parents insisted their brothers go to college, but not them. Girls who had to sacrifice for the boys in the family in myriad ways. Girls who were simply told the boys were less trouble, more responsible, harder working. In short, more important.
Then their were the girls who were abused by family members. One repeatedly raped by her own father. She took her own life while still a teenager.
Sexism is alive and well right here in the good old USA. I think a lot of people have blinders on about that. That includes a lot of women and a lot of self-described feminists.
Gayle, that post is by Holly, not Jill.
Yeah, the Hillary bashing…. sigh.
Holly wrote the post?
Indeed she did. Thanks.
There’s an Obama bash in the last comment in that post — wanna bet that one gets called out? Cause bashing Obama is a feminist issue… although bashing Clinton obviously isn’t… don’t ask me to explain that one.
Right the hell on. And it isn’t about some imperialistic crap where the US invades because of the oppression. It is about inalienable human rights for women 100 percent of the time, no exceptions. Just the other day my mother asked me if I thought what was going on the Mormon compounds in Texas was acceptable because it was their culture. I was like, of course not. If it were white men being murdered, rather than white women being raped, this would not even be a question. That standard should apply all across the globe.
However, I do feel that feminism, especially WOC feminists, can strive to end racism without making it about your brother. It *can* and should be woman based. I just went and read the racialicious post in response to this one and she was spot on that sexism alters women’s lives in different ways according to race and ethnicity. She says “The white girl being relegated to the coffee machine still has a job. My resume is in the recycle bin.”
Thanks for this Apostate. You’re so inspired of late – and I”m guessing part of that comes from a place of pain, for which I’m sorry, but know that you are being heard.
It always puzzles me when feminism is relegated to a side issue, something that can be dealt with later while The Important People take care of The Important Issues. Half the planet!
Which is why the “Hillary should drop out” chorus pisses me off so deeply. She’s a woman, she’s supposed to put aside her personal ambitions for the greater good. Well fuck that.
I’m not going to personally call out either one, because I don’t tend to do that in my threads every time someone says something dumb or mildly derailing or tries to start some other kind of argument — if other people reading want to call that stuff out, fine by me. I don’t think I’ve written practically at all about the election (and don’t really want to) so I assume that earlier comment must be about Jill.
As for the “is racism a feminist issue” thing. I think the answer is actually no, it’s not. My take is rather that a feminism that does not include anti-racist analysis, and take the time to include the effects of its politics on race as well as gender, is not real feminism — because most of the women of the world are women of color, and affected by racism and imperialism in ways that cannot be easily disentangled from or prioritized below how they’re affected by misogyny and sexism. Of course, the same is true about an “anti-racist” politics as well — most of the people of color in the world are women, and most of the rest are closely connected to women in their families.
In other words, I don’t believe in single-issue politics anymore. This is all related to the recent anger pitting “mainstream white feminism” vs. “radical WOC feminism” of course.
“Jill certainly does go out of her way in her attempts to recast this as a feminist issue. I still define this shooting as a racist act and a hate crime, etc.”
And of course it’s both, it’s not an either/or choice. The either/or choice is exactly the problem I want to resist.
Also, when you said Feministing in the text of your original post, Apostate — did you mean Feministe? If so I’d definitely like to address your points, maybe in a post on Feministe, but for clarity’s sake I thought I check what you meant / see if edits are in order beforehand.
Holly, welcome!
To answer your question, I didn’t mean Feministe — I was talking about both blogs and when I said Feministing, I meant Feministing. Sorry if that was confusing.
To your point that most women in the world are not white and are therefore affected by race issues — as one of those women, I beg to disagree. If you live in a predominantly brown third world country, racism is the least of your problems.
That’s actually why I particularly included imperialism, actually. I know what you mean, since I’m another one of those women and spent chunks of my life growing up outside the West. But global economic disparities and imperialist politics are also race issues — ones that affect everyone.
I do want to add that I think you have a very good point, especially when it comes to organizations, about focusing work, prioritizing when it comes to the hard decisions, and keeping women at the center. But the diameter of the circle is as crucial as the position of the center, if you ask me — and how you regard and think about issues that are on the periphery.
Right, imperialism and colonialism (especially the latter, but the former more so in the current era) affect the way we live our lives and the choices we get.
My dad immigrated, like millions of other people, for these reasons. That certainly shaped my destiny!
But I have always seen colonialism and imperialism as affecting one by dint of one’s nationality (which is mutable) rather than race. Sure, a lot of colonized people are non-white, but that is not an inherent characteristic of colonialism or imperialism. Muslims/Arabs conquered other non-whites and also some whites. That was as much colonialism/Empire as what the Brits did.
In the coming decades, China will be on top. America is already losing its international hegemony.
And look at me! In another year or so, I’ll have an American passport and I’ve already shed a lot of the negative influences of colonialism on my country.
I just can’t make race a global issue. Race is far more important in countries that are seen as attractive places to immigrate to from third world countries, thus bringing people of diverse origins in one place.
So I guess it’s just a coincidence that the words “brown” and “third world” are right next to each other in your second-to-last post? You get my point — and I of course understand yours that race operates very differently in different places. I’ve been on the receiving end of prejudice from white people and non-white people alike, in different countries.
But I don’t see how, given the history of colonialism and how predominantly it involved white powers dominating the globe for centuries, and the legacy that’s left behind that makes some (mostly white, definitely with some exceptions) places “more attractive places to immigrate to” and all that — how global politics could NOT be a race issue. I mean, to me it sounds a lot like saying “well, men are raped sometimes, and women have raped other women… so we can’t really say rape is a feminist issue.”
Not all third world countries are brown and not all brown countries are third world (if you’ll excuse the ungrammatical shorthand — “brown countries”). When I said ” brown third world country” I was thinking of a country like Pakistan, where I come from. Didn’t mean that to be shorthand for all third world countries. The whole point was, if you’re brown in a brown third world country, racism doesn’t much arise.
And did you notice what I said about China?
The triumph of the west over the east (after Islam’s hegemony of 5 centuries) was a military triumph. In one word: gunpowder. The skin color? Yeah, coincidence.
Seeing colonialism as a white-oppresses-nonwhite phenomenon is simply not going far enough back in history.
Global politics are mostly an economic issue. When the capitalist man wants to rip someone off, he cares not what color his victim is.
Your rape analogy went right over my head.
If you notice, we’ve gone past what is or is not feminist to how much of a problem race is worldwide. :)
That said, I still have no idea what Sean Bell has to do with feminism.
Holly — my joke above was a continuation of various conversations happening elsewhere rather than a critique of Feministe hosts voting for Obama (In fact, I believe not all of the hosts are). To the extent the prediction was half-serious, it related to likely behavior of peanut gallery rather than hosts.
“I mean, to me it sounds a lot like saying “well, men are raped sometimes, and women have raped other women… so we can’t really say rape is a feminist issue.”
Apostate, I’m sure this didn’t go over your head, but you may be struggling with how it makes sense, as I am. Rape statistics, which I’m too lazy to dig up right now, will most likely establish that far north of 75% of rapes are of women. Issues like immigration, prison reform, police brutality (obviously all critical ones) affect either both genders equally or men predominantly. In circumstances in which they are being discussed as they relate to women, they are — drumbeat — feminist issues. In the abstract, they are not. In the abstract, rape, which is overwhelmingly a female-victim crime, is therefore indeed a feminist issue.
I lied — I did find that stat. It’s 99% female victims. Not victims by default — as in, women are affected as family members of a man who is directly affected by something (which would make any issue a feminist issue, as most men have female relatives living). But actual victims.
But the post title says it best: “This is Not About My Brother.”
Octo — although Apostate sees this as merely a coincidence of recent history, the reason I brought up the rape analogy was to point out that you can’t say “rape isn’t a feminist issue because a fifth of rape victims are men” and similarly, it doesn’t make sense to say “colonialism and imperialism has nothing to do with race, because it’s totally random chance that all the white European powers took over everyone else and slaughtered millions and killed the revolutionaries and drew the borders of the modern nation-states back in the 17th-20th centuries.”
And I guess it’s also random that there is no such thing on this planet as a “white third world country.” I mean, I see your points and your perspective, and I don’t think it’s worth arguing over — but I do have to say your perspective on this stuff, and what you choose to gently slide out of the picture (race, entirely) is pretty baffling to me in the same way that foxybrown was baffled in the next thread over.
Oh sorry, thanks for getting the statistic, my post shouldn’t say “a fifth” then, it should say “some rape victims are men!” I didn’t think it could possibly be that high.
(As high as a fifth or 25%, I mean. The 99% is not surprising.)
“I do have to say your perspective on this stuff, and what you choose to gently slide out of the picture (race, entirely) is pretty baffling to me in the same way that foxybrown was baffled in the next thread over.”
To whom are you addressing this? And whether it’s Apostate or me, how do you know enough about our feminist activities to claim that we are sliding race out of the picture? I don’t want to make this about me and give you line item by line item, but suffice it to say that if I did you might be surprised.
Let me make this a bit more clear, Holly. I view BFP’s writings on the gendered aspects of immigration to be feminist issue. I just read Davis’ Women Race and Class and I view that as a feminist book. I see Smith’s “Conquest” as a feminist book. I look at Islamic women’s right to education as a feminist issue. I view pressure on Asian women to get eye surgery (my sister was once told to do this) as a feminist issue.
So take issue with my definition of feminism if you wish, but please don’t accuse me of sliding race out of the picture. That’s insulting and inaccurate.
As for the “is racism a feminist issue” thing. I think the answer is actually no, it’s not. My take is rather that a feminism that does not include anti-racist analysis, and take the time to include the effects of its politics on race as well as gender, is not real feminism
Certainly.
What we were discussing at Octo’s is anti-racism, immigration reform, prison reform should not REPLACE feminism. Feminism should incorporate anti-racist, anti-colonialist analyses not the other way round. Meanwhile, anti-racism should incorporate a feminist analysis to make work easier for women of color.
Holly, no such thing as a white third world country? What about Eastern Europe?
Apostate, you say it is only an economics issue, but I think it is an issue of looking at who has the power/resources/money. Being a woman makes it more likely than any other factor that you will be poor. I’m sure that heads of most Multinational corporations are also probably male and white. Not all non-white countries have had these problems. China got crap from Japan, not the west. Colonialism and imperialism were usually dictated by a combo fun pack of race and money. Sorry to throw what might seem like random facts that you probably already know at your blog. Especially when I mostly agree with what your saying.
PS, what Donna Darko said.
Octo, I was referring to this and the post right before this one by apostate, both of which seem to me to take a stance of trying to sharply delineate “racism issues” from “feminism issues” in a way that I find profoundly disturbing and potentially destructive to anti-racist, feminist movement building. I wasn’t referring to anything else at all. And I agree with your examples of things that are very clearly both racial and gender issues, right smack in the middle of the venn diagram. That doesn’t mean other issues shouldn’t be in the picture — of both feminism and anti-racism as well. It’s the building of political silos and policing of the boundaries of those silos that I take issue with, and foxybrown’s comments on the previous thread explain quite well.
This is a notion of feminism that I find myself quite averse to — of course I wish you well in any work you’re doing that supports women, but this particular “sharp division” method is inimical to quite a lot of people who are both people of color AND women and cannot just compartmentalize the two in our politics or the analysis we bring to our work, and would find ourselves quite ideologically impoverished if we did. In other words, I don’t think I can participate in this style of feminism, and that’s too bad; I want a feminism that works for all of us who want to end the oppression and needless, unjust suffering of women.
I also agree with what donna darko just said.
As for Eastern Europe — since you’re the one who used the term “third world” in the first place, it’s a term from the Cold War. Eastern Europe at that point was considered part of the “second world,” which is also quite a mess at this point, but for very different historical reasons. Was white Eastern Europe colonized by imperialist powers in the last few centuries? That’s why it’s not considered a “third world country.” The problems are different in historical origin and different in their current nature too — but you can ask a native about that, who I’m sure could elaborate quite eloquently about the differences between living after the fall of communism and living in a former colony.
Holly, I’m going to let you have the last word on this. We’ve both sufficiently explained our positions, and although I don’t think we disagree on the fundamentals of intersectionality, we aren’t going to get past the issues we don’t see eye to eye on.
Thanks for visiting and commenting.
I’m going to bed!
[...] was having this exchange with Jill, some conversations about what is or is not a feminist issue and what should or should not be posted on feminist blogs, specifically with regards to posts about the Sean Bell verdict on Feministing and here on [...]
I will just note quickly that venn diagrams (good framework, thanks) don’t really have a “middle.” There are sections that overlap and sections that don’t. As Donna has said elsewhere, the other movements do not talk about the non-overlapping areas that aren’t in their movement and rarely even discuss the overlapping areas. All of us agree that feminism should discuss the overlapping areas. Why it also has the responsibility to discuss the non-overlapping ones that are not within its movement is the question — when that doesn’t come back the other way.
[...] should have written this earlier. In response to this, this, [...]
what you choose to gently slide out of the picture (race, entirely)
Let me make this a bit more clear, Holly. I view BFP’s writings on the gendered aspects of immigration to be feminist issue. I just read Davis’ Women Race and Class and I view that as a feminist book. I see Smith’s “Conquest” as a feminist book. I look at Islamic women’s right to education as a feminist issue. I view pressure on Asian women to get eye surgery (my sister was once told to do this) as a feminist issue.
So take issue with my definition of feminism if you wish, but please don’t accuse me of sliding race out of the picture. That’s insulting and inaccurate.
It’s a much bigger problem for feminism when anti-racists gently slide gender out of feminism. How about making male-lead anti-racist movements accountable to gender? Why is it only feminism that has to has to change? Why can’t both happen at the same time so women, white and of color, aren’t overburdened?