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| Pic author's own |
There are 2 things I took away
from the Dr Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers talk for This Is 42 at Town
Hall in Sydney last night. Firstly, the notion that some people believe
Feminism is now too radical, divisive and exclusionary, as Ms Sommers suggests.
Secondly, that the way
to address this is for women to come together and, in particular, to reach out
to the most disadvantaged women in “developing” nations to progress forward.
My take is that Feminism is
absolutely radical and militant right now and needs to be because we find
ourselves at a time when misogyny is no longer an open secret, but a full
blown, in your face, mainstream and acceptable way to behave both in everyday
and political life. Whether this is a backlash to the supposed gains that women
have made or simply the scum rising to the surface, scum that has always been
there but has been allowed to flourish and is now undeniably seen, is just a
chicken and the egg argument, futile.
We have Trump in the White
House, right wing misogynist politicians, both men and women, in every
developed country on the globe, in our media, judicial and education systems.
In Australia, 1 woman is killed a week by an intimate current or ex-partner. We
are not doing fine!
The democratisation of
information through social media, has meant that women have come forward to
disclose their experiences, can come together to support each other globally,
organise and mobilise in real time, in response to individual events and
broader social issues. Whether these events are tokenistic, few and far
between, selective only to demonstrate who is deserving of support and who
maintains power is debatable. Perhaps people who feel that feminism is too
radical are those who have held onto power for so long and think they own
feminism. Suddenly marginalised women have a voice. Marginalised people are
seen. “Equality feels like oppression when you’re accustomed to privilege.”
Privilege isn’t necessarily wealth either, white skin is a privilege, as is an
abled body, being a CIS hetero, being raised in a Judeo-Christian religion, not
ever having experienced war, having access to education.
Feminism is radical and
militant because it is responding to a capitalist, patriarchal, colonial,
imperialist and white supremacist world that is destroying not only the planet
and subsequently our species’ existence on it, but also the lives of othered
people that don’t fit the dominant paradigm of that narrative on a daily basis.
People that DO fit the
narrative of the dominant paradigm; white, male, able bodied, straight,
Christian, wealthy, educated, ‘western’ or any of those combinations are having
those values and traits questioned and measured against an alternative lived
experience, one that is not any of those things and can never be and that
applies to the majority of people. Suddenly, aspiring to this narrative, the
impossibility of it and the demand that people do that to the exclusion of
everything else is being rejected.
We need to go back to talking
about ideologies. Yes, the bodies we inhabit matter hugely. The intersections
of our privileges and oppressions, individually and collectively are important
and dictate our lived experiences as citizens and as nations.
We need to continue to shed
light on these individual experiences but that does not eliminate the need to
talk about structures that continue to be racist, white/western supremacist,
sexist, heteronormative, homogenised and classist.
