I wasn’t going to say anything. I don’t have that many readers, what does my opinion matter? But a few people asked what I thought on this matter, so here it goes:
Confession: I am a total political theory nerd. I’m fascinated by politics in the abstract but I’m kind of bored with the pragmatic and the real-world wonky political minutiae. I think, though, that the latter has its place and that, when espousing any political ideology, one has to ask, “What’s the point?” I label myself as a feminist, I probably fall mostly in the liberal feminist camp. This is fun in the abstract because you can have debates about what gender really means and you have those college-era dialogues about Judith Butler and Andrea Dworkin and identity.
Because here’s the thing about me. I was probably always a feminist but was reluctant to label myself as such. I spent my formative years on the national high school policy debate circuit, which is most definitely a boy’s club (I was the only girl who made it to the varsity team the whole time I was in high school). We debated theory a lot, and feminism in particular was openly mocked. One of our rival teams when I was a senior often used a nearly unbeatable feminist argument, and the argument and its writer (another rare female varsity debater) were dismissively labeled feminazi and subject to ridicule. As a teenager, I didn’t want to be associated with that. It wasn’t until I started taking women’s studies classes in college (and the first one I took mostly because the professor was universally liked and the class conveniently met in my dorm building) that I Got It. And the women’s studies department at my university was made up of nearly all minority professors, which meant the emphasis was about feminism for everyone and in particular how race, gender, and class intersect. So that’s my feminist background. I like to think that I Get It.
But what’s the point?
Well, the point is that being a feminist carries a certain amount of obligation with it. What good is the high-falutin’ discourse if there’s no practical application?
What is it that we want? Political ideology has to be selfish to a point because we adhere to it because of something we need or something we’re lacking. We try to convince others to espouse our ideology also by appealing to their needs and what’s lacking in their lives.
I personally have moved away from the theory in recent years and thought more about what feminism can do for me. On the theory level, I’ve argued here before that abortion isn’t just a feminist issue, it’s THE feminist issue, because a state-mandated lack of access to it is an affront to women’s basic autonomy over our own bodies. I still believe that, and that informs what I fight for politically. What do I want for myself and how can feminism help me? If feminism is ultimately about equality, I want equal access. I want to be taken seriously. I want to be paid as much as my male counterparts at work. After that it gets trickier. I want self-autonomy. I want to be able to make decisions about what’s right for my body and my lifestyle, which means deciding when I get married, when I have children, when I work, and when I have sex. It means having freedom of movement, being free of fear. It means I want to be judged for my ideas not the size of my breasts.
Well, so, okay. That’s where I’m coming from. I wasn’t following it, but there was some animosity on the feminist blogosphere earlier this week. My understanding is that Amanda Marcotte wrote an article about immigration that sounded awfully similar to something a woman of color blogger, Brownfemipower, wrote. There were accusations of plagiarism lobbed. Brownfemipower quit blogging. The bigger issue was not so much the plagiarism but the fact that Amanda, a white woman, brought attention to an issue in a way that a woman of color couldn’t and thus rendered that woman of color invisible. (Or this was my interpretation. Y’all can correct me.) This is an old issue: since the 70s (or since the 1870s even, Sojourner Truth notwithstanding) white feminists — who have benefited the most from progressive politics, I would argue — have largely been oblivious to their own privilege and left women of color out of the equation, made them feel they weren’t part of the larger movement.
It’s an important issue to talk about, although I didn’t because I don’t know that I, as a white woman, have much I can add. It sucks that there’s still some racism inherent in the movement. A lot of the apologies I’ve read have rubbed me the wrong way because they sound kind of patronizing, and I never wanted to do that, didn’t want to add to any hurt feelings. What can I do but try to be aware of my own privilege and try to do better by these women who feel they’ve been silenced?
And, besides, ideology is selfish, right? That’s the sad truth.
The success of feminism depends, of course, on the success of all women, including those who are not like me. And women’s experiences are far from universal. So if I have learned anything from reading blog posts on the topic over the last few days, it’s that there’s value in helping all women achieve feminism’s goals, that I can’t succeed unless I help others succeed.
It’s important to keep the discourse going to an extent. I think dwelling on this particular incident is not that useful. We need to take a step back and look at the more systemic problem of racism and privilege in the feminist community, because apologies don’t make the problem go away, although acknowledgment of the problem is a step in the right direction, I think.
Anyway, I didn’t know about any of the controversy when I made plans with some friends to go see Amanda Marcotte read from her new book It’s a Jungle Out There last night. I went to the reading (and here’s proof: that mass of brown hair on the far right of the picture is the back of my head).
And no sooner did I get my book signed than someone noticed that some of the retro jungle images used in the book are pretty darned racist.
Amanda has since apologized, and so has the publisher. Probably I could say something here about how Seal Press not realizing the images were racist to begin with just speaks to their own white privilege, this coming on the heels of a brouhaha in the feminist blog community about how they don’t publish many (or any?) writers of color. But do I even have the agency to speak here? Am I just as full of shit as all the other white apologists?
It sucks. It sucks that this happened. It sucks that women of color feel invisible, that our own willful ignorance renders them invisible. It sucks that white privilege is still not acknowledged by many white feminists. It sucks.
And that’s what I have to say about that.
