Feminism’s focus on women
Laurie Penny explains about feminism to a wondering world.
First of all there’s the subhead, which is probably not her doing, but it does rather set the tone.
Feminism’s focus on women can be alienating to queer people and anyone questioning the gender binary. But it doesn’t have to be.
“Feminism’s focus on women” – pause to savor that. How dare feminism focus on women? Other people have problems too ya know! And yet would BuzzFeed remark that anti-racism’s focus on people of color can be alienating? Would it fret that the labor movement focuses on labor?
I don’t think so. It’s only feminism that the libertarian left is so relentlessly eager to ostracize. It’s as if feminism has somehow morphed into an Eisenhower-era country club.
I’ve never felt quite like a woman, but I’ve never wanted to be a man, either. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be something in between. To quote Ruby Rose: I called myself a girl, but only because my options were limited. I always assumed that everyone felt that way.
But in school the other girls looked at her funny, so she assumed that only she felt that way.
Well I know how that goes, I was that girl, and yes I too felt like a weirdo, although less and less as we all grew older, because other girls were letting their inner weirdo out. But at any rate, that was school. Once I was out of school, I learned I wasn’t That Special. It’s very important to learn that you’re not That Special. By all means dissent, nonconform, be eccentric, but don’t think that makes you special, because it doesn’t. Very few people are all that special, and the odds that one is oneself one of those people are very slim.
It was around this time that I first read second-wave feminist Germaine Greer.
I really wish people would stop doing that. I really wish young lightweights would stop patronizing feminists who are older than they are by shoving them into the hospice labeled “Second Wave.”
According to Greer, liberation meant understanding that whatever you were in life, you were a woman first. Her writing helped me understand how society saw me — and every other female person I’d ever met. We were not human beings first: We were just girls. Looking back, though, that militant insistence on womanhood before everything is part of the reason it’s taken me a decade to admit that, in addition to being a feminist, I’m genderqueer. That I’m here to fight for women’s rights, that I play for the girls’ team, but I have never felt like much of a woman at all.
But that’s feminism. “A woman”=that subordinate person who had the bad taste not to be a man. Not feeling like that person, not accepting that subordination, that not feeling like such a person – that’s feminism. It’s not opposed to feminism or an addendum to feminism, it is feminism.
Only when we recognize that “manhood” and “womanhood” are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism, of misogyny, of the way we are all worked over by gender in the end.
But, again, that’s feminism. It’s not exclusive to genderqueer feminism, it’s just feminism…or, at least, it’s just radical feminism. The more corporate kind of feminism wants barriers broken down but doesn’t want to ditch gender. And yet radical feminism is the kind that’s accused of being transphobic.
I don’t want to see a world without gender. I want to see a world where gender is not oppressive or enforced, where there are as many ways to express and perform and relate to your own identity as there are people on Earth. I want a world where gender is not painful, but joyful.
But until then, we’ve got this one. And for as long as we all have to navigate a gender binary that’s fundamentally broken and a sex class system that seeks to break us, I’m happy to be a gender traitor.
I’m a genderqueer woman, and a feminist.
Great. As far as I can tell, so am I. What’s all this about “second-wave” feminism again?
I also remember for a while a kind of essentialist feminism that insisted on the Power of Motherhood and Feminine Sexuality and the Feminine Divine, which while nicely elevating some aspects of women’s lives often denigrated, was not at all appealing to those of us who didn’t feel all that womanly nor wanted to.
Oh yes, oh yes. Difference Feminism. That’s one of the first things I wrote about when this website started.
Well, that link took me down a rabbit hole. Now back to work…
Thanks for the link. You really put great words around my reaction to it. Although I also tried to see both sides, as I certainly have absorbed the mainstream of thought that prioritizes logic, judgement, argumentation, etc, so maybe I wasn’t *appreciating* the other ways of (non)thinking.
The elevation of supposed female (positive) characteristics doesn’t do women any favours and doesn’t advance the cause of gender equality. A while ago a member of our local atheist group wanted to do a study to figure out how to get more women to come out to events. His reason? Women are always the best organizers. And I recently have been made aware of female feminists who consider that epistemology is patriarchal
Ugh, Buzzfeed. Progressive, which is nice and all, but so. fucking. vapid.
Theo Bromine:
Hm. I think your first contention is very disputable, unlike your second — wherein your phrasing is suggestively guarded.
Laurie Penny represents the intersection of so much that is bad.
I remember when she made a false claim in the Guardian about the make up of protests against segregation at British Universities, ignoring the organizers which included the Southall Black Sisters, to denounce the protest as a right wing Islamaphobic menace. When her error was pointed out to The Guardian, they printed an amendment to the article. Penny herself never apologised, despite being given ample opportunity. She simply moved on.
I also find it interesting that none of her social analysis focuses on Class. Wonder why?
But the ‘special’ extra-wonderful, aspects that difference feminism insists on ranting about are just THEIR chosen set of social constructs. Just as arbitrary and cultural as any MRA crap you can dig up.
Indeed. It’s the same old shit, just valorized rather than despised. Janet Radcliffe Richards skewered that brilliantly.
@John Morales #7
Please elaborate on your dispute with my contention that The elevation of supposed female (positive) characteristics doesn’t do women any favours
Also, I don’t see why you think the statement doesn’t advance the case of gender equality is “guarded”. You are welcome to disagree with the statement, but I think what I am saying is quite clear.
That use of the word “guarded” looks to me like a completely gratuitous drive-by insult.
We recently had a speaker at our college (speaking to the faculty about how to retain students, because of course we drive them away with clubs every chance we get) who trotted out the fact that women are more likely to complete college than men, who drop out in the largest numbers. He then attributed this (without evidence presented) to the fact that women are better at forming relationships. It couldn’t have anything to do with women having some sort of intellectual drive, or maybe the fact that when women find themselves not at the top of the heap, they’re used to it and roll with the flow, where intelligent men are often used to being treated with more deference than they get in college. I’m not saying it’s either of those reasons, either. I have no evidence, and unlike this speaker, am not going to present things as settled and conclusive without evidence. I’m not sure I even think those are the reasons! What I DO think is that you probably have a very complex issue that he’s reduced down to a male/female stereotype that does neither group any good.
Of course, the next day when he identified single mothers as the largest dropout group, one has to wonder where he gets his statistics from in the first place – unless single women are mostly male, that seems to contradict his statement of the day before, a fact which I seem to be the only one who noticed.
Percentages as opposed to absolute numbers, I think, just badly phrased. Single mothers being the group with the largest drop out rate, rather than the largest drop out group.
Theo Bromine:
I can’t do that, since I didn’t dispute it, but rather claimed I think it very disputable.
Because emphasising differences is the actually the opposite of advancing the case for equality.
Perhaps. But he presented it as percentages in both cases, which could have been a mistake, or it could have been (which I think it was) presenting whatever data point suited the argument he was making at the time, since he contradicted himself several times and never presented any hard data in any way. He was brought in for a purpose, which seemed to be to bludgeon the faculty because we aren’t meeting some perfect ideal. In addition, the conversations they reported with the students violated the stated theme, that students weren’t particularly happy with what their instructors were doing, so we needed to change.
Since he so happily contradicted himself regularly, I suspect he just had points he wanted to make. He may have known better than what he said, but it wasn’t the proper talking points of the day.