Posted by mindshare on 2004-12-26 10:57:16
Post Subject: the feminism question
This has been on my mind for quite a while, and the 'feminism and domesticity' thread has got me excited about you all and I'd love some insight on this...
My partner has been questioning feminism a lot lately -- not the concept, but the word. Don't get me wrong; he's not one of those assholes who says "I'm not a feminist because I'm for the equality of EVERYONE" or something ridiculous like that. He knows that's what feminism IS. But he was asking me if I thought it was still a valuable word, since feminism (in the 3rd wave anyway) is so broad and there's so much emphasis on class, ethnicity, etc., and not just gender. And that there's a lot of feminist study now that's more like gender study, and we're looking at masculinities more... and basically that what feminists seek to do is to get rid of oppression -- all kinds.
I said that even though yeah, that's true, the word feminism is still important because it acknowledges just WHO has been historically oppressed: women.
But I don't know. There's so much feminist writing now questioning the way we categorise people into male/female and nothing else. How the basis of oppression is us putting male and female in binary opposition to each other. So I'm wondering: even though 'feminism' acknowledges that it's women have been and are oppressed because they're women... does the term do us a disservice by keeping the focus on difference? I mean... where do trans people fit in? Or people who don't identify as any gender?
Hopefully that makes sense... maybe a lot of writing has been done on this already -- if so, please point me in the right direction.
