When a feminist isn't a "feminist"
13 Apr 2008 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI spent hours yesterday and today reading up on this trainwreck in the feminist blogosphere after links from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
miriam_heddy and ciderpress. It's about racism and intellectual theft, and how white feminists use their priviledge, consciously or un-, to coopt the voices of women of colour, claiming their ideas in the process of making those ideas heard without attribution instead of working to make the voices of women of colour heard as well.
As my mouth fell slowly open in horror yesterday, I understood for the first time why some women who believe in the systematic oppression of women and believe that it's wrong choose not to call themselves "feminists." For the first time, I understood that this has nothing to do with a misunderstanding of terminology on their part. What this battle over terminology has to do with is yet another one-way visible veil of priviledge blinding us over here on the priviledged side of the veil. We have the luxury of saying that the history of the movement doesn't matter because of the dictionary definition, of all things. We have the luxury of saying, "But look at the dictionary! You meet the dictionary criteria, so if you claim not to be a feminist, you're wrong." But women of colour don't have that luxury. They can't define a political movement by the dictionary in defiance of its history and its present when it's busy silencing them, instead of doing what it says on the tin and working to change their marginalisation.
I'm ashamed and disgusted that I didn't see this before and that I inadvertently contributed to the attempts of systemic priviledge to silence the marginalised by arguing this point with them before. I'm sorry, belatedly, to my friends and to anyone who's listened to me say those things, whatever side of the fence they're standing on. I was wrong.
miriam_heddy and ciderpress. It's about racism and intellectual theft, and how white feminists use their priviledge, consciously or un-, to coopt the voices of women of colour, claiming their ideas in the process of making those ideas heard without attribution instead of working to make the voices of women of colour heard as well.As my mouth fell slowly open in horror yesterday, I understood for the first time why some women who believe in the systematic oppression of women and believe that it's wrong choose not to call themselves "feminists." For the first time, I understood that this has nothing to do with a misunderstanding of terminology on their part. What this battle over terminology has to do with is yet another one-way visible veil of priviledge blinding us over here on the priviledged side of the veil. We have the luxury of saying that the history of the movement doesn't matter because of the dictionary definition, of all things. We have the luxury of saying, "But look at the dictionary! You meet the dictionary criteria, so if you claim not to be a feminist, you're wrong." But women of colour don't have that luxury. They can't define a political movement by the dictionary in defiance of its history and its present when it's busy silencing them, instead of doing what it says on the tin and working to change their marginalisation.
I'm ashamed and disgusted that I didn't see this before and that I inadvertently contributed to the attempts of systemic priviledge to silence the marginalised by arguing this point with them before. I'm sorry, belatedly, to my friends and to anyone who's listened to me say those things, whatever side of the fence they're standing on. I was wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Apr 2008 02:30 pm (UTC)racismthe larger picture because theydidn't ask nicelywere too angryaccused her of appropriation. She says this isn't theoretical, it could seriously affect her career. Unlike racism, which, thankfully, is totally hypothetical and doesn't really affect anyone in any way.I don't think I can read any further.
I'm still a feminist (yield that ground to *her*? uh, no) but if a POC argues that it's a movement for white women to gain privilege at the expense of POC? I can see that. Certainly some feminists are. And I don't want to ally myself with those feminists.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Apr 2008 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 13 Apr 2008 06:51 pm (UTC)That history's been ugly, a lot of times, and it's disingenuous to say, as I've heard and maybe said in the past, that the voices of white feminism which speak up to silence POCs aren't the voice of feminism, but merely the voices of people who happen to also work for feminism. No one can speak for a movement, but the pattern of its members' actions can speak for itself. And the pattern of supporting white priviledge has gone on a long time, and continues right up to the white feminists jumping to the defense of white feminism in the wake of those ugly statements about Barack Obama a few weeks ago. It's viscerally real to me, now, that those actions of white feminists do form a pattern of systematically oppressing POCs, that they can't meaningfully be taken in isolation from their identities as feminist; that any meaningful discussion of feminism has to deal with the reality, present and past, of the feminist movement and what it's actually done, and not with the dictionary definition. In other words, I now see that it's possible for someone to passionately believe in struggling to end the systematic societal oppression of women, and yet for that person's principles/goals not to align with feminism's, while the political presence of feminism is controlled by white feminists.