so, like, why IS the word feminist important?
i feel like with that question, i am simultaneously way late to one party and raining like hell on another. and you know: it’s a question, and it is, like everything i write here to varying degrees, about me-me-me. and also, possibly, about you, if you are a person reading this who would like to share why the word feminist is important to you. i mean that genuinely, this is a thing i am really thinking over right now.
it’s weird, because i always have been a very pro-calling-things-feminist type. like, i never had the “and then i realized i didn’t need to be scared to call myself a feminist” moment, for which i give myself zero credit and my mother all the credit. but thinking about it, right now, i seriously can’t think of a reason for which, in any specific instance, it is important to discuss the potential applicability of the word feminist.
this has been a while brewing, and maybe it’s just burnout. maybe i have just had one too many fruitless discussions about whether or not something “is” feminist with too many people, online and in person. can heels be feminist. is sex and the city feminist. is sailor moon feminist. of course, most recently, is sarah motherfucking palin feminist. and my answer, more and more, is: who cares.
which, first off: these questions are all to some extent kind of stupid, because wow, holy black and white, batman! i don’t like talking about what something is, so much as i like talking about the various elements of things. here are things in which x is feminist, here are things in which it is not. sailor moon features girls in short-ass skirts and a boy-obsessed heroine. also, it features a pretty diverse set of personalities and gender-presentations (my favoritest of course being sailor uranus, who is in her civilian garb frequently mistaken for a boy because she wears the boys’ school uniform. also she is a race car driver. SO COOL, RIGHT?). these things are both simultaneously true.
but then i’m like, do we really need to work the word feminist in here? can’t we talk about ways in which it is sexist and ways in which it is anti-sexist? because actually, i kind of like the word anti-sexist better than feminist right now. it seems, oddly, more positive to me, even though it is defined in a negative-space way. i like that it identifies a thing to fight against, instead of conjuring up vague images of things to fight for which, yeah, can be ultimately interpreted however the fuck anyone wants.
like: is sarah palin a feminist? people apparently give a shit about this question, and are apparently split on it. there was a point (and maybe will be again) when i a) would have cared and b) said fuck no, adamantly. but you know: what the fuck does feminism mean? meloukhia covered this way better than i could, in a piece that has really been on my mind since i read it: there is nothing about sarah palin you can point to and say is clearly not a thing feminists do. maybe, possibly you can point to things sarah palin does which all feminists agree should not be done. but a thing sarah palin does no feminists do? not so much, no.
but: is sarah palin anti-sexist? duh, no. that’s easy.
but i mean, maybe i am just pushing the problem along. maybe i am just opening the issue up to all these questions being asked, but instead about the definition of sexism, and what counts as sexist, and what reinforces it or doesn’t, and isn’t the same.
and… maybe it is, effectively. but i feel like: i am pretty over conversations about whether something is feminist in which feminist is not synonymous with beneficial. and it doesn’t necessarily simplify the conversation, to change that particular term. but it does make me question the value of the word feminism, because i really bristle at the idea of the word feminist being used in situations that do not mean “beneficial for women and/or gender equality.” like, a conversation about whether something is feminist that does not boil down to whether something or not is beneficial/harmful, that’s not really a conversation i care about having.
(the one place i do think the word feminist has a clear value, maybe weirdly for me, is when talking about analysis - not necessarily, obviously, in academia - because it does mean something specific to me to say, “i am examining this book from a feminist perspective,” meaning from one oriented towards the role of gender in the work, perhaps with an aim to resist conventional/patriarchal assumptions about the work, gender, etc.)
