Orangey
Blah
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2008
- Messages
- 6,354
- MBTI Type
- ESTP
- Enneagram
- 6w5
I am certainly a feminist. Of course, everyone basically defines their own meaning of the term whenever they use it. For instance, I say that I'm a feminist, but I don't buy into much of black feminist thought (a la Audre Lorde) or a lot of standpoint theory (a la Sandra Harding or Luce Irigaray). Similar to what ajblaise said, many feminisms are closely tied to other ideologies or social movements, such as Marxism (in the real sense of the term, not it's renewed political use), Afrocentrism, or different postmodern linguistic theories.
I simply say that I am a feminist in the general sense, meaning that I identify with the motivation behind all of these theoretical formulations. That is to say, I identify with an overarching experience of women that seems to make them conscious of systemic oppression, even granting the huge differences between the individual experiences of women. The conceptualization of that oppression (in terms of its mechanisms and its values), or the proper action to take against it, is pretty much constantly contested territory, so it would be hard for me to adopt a hardline position on any one of them.
And I agree with Ivy. Turning the word "feminism" into something of a taboo is, at least as I see it, a strategic rhetorical move to quell resistance. I'll stop now, though, because I'm probably making myself sound more radical than I actually am. You wouldn't believe it, but in my grad program, I'm actually among the more conservative of the lot in this regard.
I simply say that I am a feminist in the general sense, meaning that I identify with the motivation behind all of these theoretical formulations. That is to say, I identify with an overarching experience of women that seems to make them conscious of systemic oppression, even granting the huge differences between the individual experiences of women. The conceptualization of that oppression (in terms of its mechanisms and its values), or the proper action to take against it, is pretty much constantly contested territory, so it would be hard for me to adopt a hardline position on any one of them.
And I agree with Ivy. Turning the word "feminism" into something of a taboo is, at least as I see it, a strategic rhetorical move to quell resistance. I'll stop now, though, because I'm probably making myself sound more radical than I actually am. You wouldn't believe it, but in my grad program, I'm actually among the more conservative of the lot in this regard.