Here is the thing, feminism informs my politics. I AM a feminist. However, I believe in a kind of feminism that looks at several issues at once and interconnect them. One that seeks patterns and identifies the different forms of oppression interacting in a particular circumstance.
Earlier today, I was venting on Twitter (what’s new?) about my frustration at people cheering for the Nobel Prize awarded at three women from the Global South as “a triumph for feminism”. And I take offense over this for a number of reasons. First of all, do we know for certain that these women identify as feminists? If not, how can we justify labeling them with a political identifier that has been plagued with a less than stellar record of dismissing critique coming from women from the Global South? Not every woman fighting for women’s rights identifies as a feminist and many have good reasons not to do so.
Additionally, most people cheering for “this victory for feminism” have not said one word about the role of the West in the very same situations that brought these women to become “icons for political struggles”. That is, the Nation States where we live (at least those of us who live in Nations classified as Western), have committed some terrible shit in the Nation States where these women are from. I demand that MY feminism interrogates these actions, what MY role in these actions has been (again, as someone who lives in a Nation State classified as Western) and THEN I need to interrogate why such atrocities are committed supposedly in my name. Only then, and after I have looked at the issue critically, I might have something to say publicly about “happiness that these women won the Nobel Prize OMG GUYS SO AWESOME WOMEN RAH RAH”.
But ALSO ALSO, I cannot help but look at the disgraceful racial offenses that are happening RIGHT NOW, at this very moment, while White self identified feminists feel entitled to defend their right to use the N word in their political manifestations. And how mainstream feminism has once again failed to provide a proper, safe response to these abuses. Because the women towards whom the racial slurs were directed also happen to be WoC, not unlike the recipients of this Nobel Prize. And AGAIN intersectionality DEMANDS that we do not isolate all of these incidents, that we do not compartmentalize them as if they were not all part of the same shit pile of gender related oppression which is inextricably tied to racial oppression and to wars and State interventions. And even more so, how this gender related oppression is specifically directed at Women of Color.
But all of this was too long to fit in a single Tweet.
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