Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 January 2008 07:08:52
Sometimes, just sometimes in the classroom stuff starts to make perfect sense. Now, don't worry I'm not talking about getting one of those moments of clarity which you get when you are losing the plot rather I'm talking about a bit of theory or "stuff" suddenly falling into place.
Yesterday it happened in a classroom, not everybody got what was happening but various people (including me) did and it was facinating watching the faces change and the unconcious nodding of students which occurred over a course of a few minutes. So what was it that actually made sense and made the penny drop collectively? Feminism and why it was relevent, still is relevent but why we have almost corrupted it in the west with our version of third wave feminism. Ok the last bit wasn't quite what I said in class, but it was where we had gone.
Take as your starting point a timeline which starts in 1792 with Mary Woolstonecraft's Rights of Women and goes through to the present time. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century mark on first wave feminism and the fact women were fighting for the vote and education, etc. Pause for a moment and reflect that amongst the very elderly there are still women alive who were born before they could vote Then move onto the 1960's and second wave feminism and place yourself in a world where employers could legally discriminate, there wasn't a network of women's refuges and women were still largely economically dependent upon their partners. Pause for a moment and realise that we are not talking about this world existing too far before Tractor Girl, (who turns 36 at the end of the month) was born. Then come back to the present and start thinking about post-feminism with its focus on self-determination and the right for every woman to be who she wants and wear whatever length skirt she wants without risking hassell from a bloke. Um, in the scheme of things you can understand why the concept of feminism has had its day.
But then stop and listen to the womanists (Black Feminists) of the 1960's and 1970's and their claims that feminist theory is ethnocentric and based only around the concerns of white middle class women. Now turn your head around the world and look beyond the Western theory to a world where a large proportion of women cannot give birth without the health of themselves or their children being at risk, a world where sexual health and control over reproduction is beyond many women, a world where promiscuous men are infecting their monogomous wives at an alarming rate with HIV, a world where domestic violence is still largely ignored. In this world feminist concerns (i.e. the concerns of women about the power men have over them and the ways they are consequently disadvantaged) is about survival rather than about indulgence.
This is why feminism is still relevent, and if you want this type of feminist theory explaining don't go and pick up a text book rather read Hillary Clinton's book Living History which explains fully.
So there it is, the penny dropped that if feminism is stereotyped in the way that the word just becomes associated with extreme radical feminists and / or we deny it's current relevance by focusing only on ethnocentric concerns in our theory we will be adding to the invisibility and oppression of the many women for whom feminist concerns are still very real. Feminism can't and shouldn't just be an interesting footnote in history (yet).