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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Yes. I got told I couldn't be a feminist twice, once because I think that abortions are a bad thing (which is not the same as thinking they should be illegal) and once because you can be sexist against men as well as sexist against women (and I know, sexism against women has much more power to do harm, but that doesn't mean the other is impossible!). So, as I believe that you can't completely self define, but there has to be a commonly held socially understood meaning of words, and as lots of people have told me my beliefs don't tick the feminist boxes, I am not going to go round telling people I am feminist.

I honestly don't think 'feminist' has to mean 'is happy about abortions and thinks only men can be sexist'. To me it means simply 'thinks women should have the same rights as men'. I will probably be doing more reading around this and if it's something you/people are interested I will write stuff up.

Does 'twice' == 'lots of people'? Or are there more incidents you don't specifically mention?

"twice" as in "in two arguments", both of which had lots of people against me! I think the pro-life == not-feminist argument is something we used to have over and over on abortion debate, until I got bored of having it. Although yes, crazy americans on the internet probably not the best sample of people ;-)

I am pro-life and feminist. :) I think women should have equal rights with men; I also think women should be allowed to have abortions, and to control their own bodies, but I would much prefer that fewer women chose to have abortions. I just don't think it's my right to impose my view on everyone else by making abortions illegal or much harder to obtain.

So you're both pro-life and pro-choice :-)