taimatsu | (no subject)

I have just had my first lecture of the year - the introductory session for Women's Writing 1. This involved defining feminism, mostly, and the horrible but not unexpected discovery that about six of the 60 predominantly female people in the room defined themselves as feminist. Gaaaaah!

Also Gaaaaaah was the thing where the lecturer was talking about an essay on basic feminism which discusses the terms 'feminist' 'female' and 'feminine', and dismissed biological sex - 'female' - as binary 'apart from a few hermaphrodites and things'. I was so cross. I know a variety of people who are women but for whom the biological clues to 'sex' are not straightforwardly female - whether that's because of a chromosomal disorder, or physical intersexedness, or being transsexual/transgendered. The lecturer has no idea if one of those people is in the room, and I was cross that she made them invisible and used what I suspect is rather an inappropriate term for the biologically different. She's my seminar leader so I might be able to tackle her about it tomorrow, though it's tricky when I'm not in that group myself.

Similarly, she was talking about the prevailing image of feminism as all about 'hairy humourless lesbians'; while it's *true* that that's what people think, what if I *had* been a hairy lesbian? It really sounded very dismissive, and her talk didn't make any compensatory mention of the contributions lesbian community has made to the women's movement.

I think I sound way too 'right-on' here, but then the whole point of the lecture was to make the girls who go 'eww, I'm not a feminist!' think again. Maybe it ought to make me think again about saying 'erk, I'm not one of those radical queer folks!' (Actually, I think I'm not, but I get the feeling if I make the fairly basic points above about sex and gender non-hegemony, I'll be thought of as one.)

It makes me nervous to think of saying any of this in a seminar, but I want that to be a safe(r) space where I can talk about, you know, lesbians and queer politics if it's relevant without being afraid to come out. *sigh*

Thoughts most welcome. Anyone got any experience with feminist literary criticism or feminist writing in general? I'm making this public so I can link to it in a community.

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This involved defining feminism, mostly, and the horrible but not unexpected discovery that about six of the 60 predominantly female people in the room defined themselves as feminist. Gaaaaah!

I don't think you should be too surprised here. A word's meaning doesn't consist solely of what it ought to mean. Feminism has enough negative connotations that I can completely understand why a woman might choose not to label herself as such. (And indeed I'd never refer to myself as a feminist for exactly that reason.)

It doesn't follow from this that the remaining 54 don't care about women's rights, gender discrimination, the role of women in society and so on.

No, I said it wasn't unexpected - I certainly wasn't surprised.

Quite so, although my response to those connotations is explicitly to refer to myself as a feminist, which puts it up for debate.

Presumably implying that you favour use of the term?

Given a choice I'd rather see it deprecated since like such terms as "liberal" and "pacifist" (which also describe things I am in favour of) it draws together too many disparate ideas to be really descriptive.

Fair enough: I understand your concern but prefer to qualify a label instead of denying it. I think that's a difference of rhetoric as much as anything else.

Yes, indeed.

Also to some extent it depends on the environment one finds oneself in. I generally find myself in the presence of educated, left-wing types and feel comfortable criticising the shortcomings of modern feminism secure in the knowledge that they'll take as read my implicit support for the core ideas. In different, more hostile contexts it's sometimes useful to have a one word banner to rally around.