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[taimatsu]

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.

Comments

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

(Particularly interested in the issue of differing views within modern feminism concerning use and meaning of ther term.)

Have you scanned the wikipedia pages on this? Admittedly wikipedia is written by Real People (tm) but the pages on different forms of feminism are a good jumping off point.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I've read the Feminism base page, but I find the Wikipedia NPOV makes it pretty hopeless for this sort of purpose. In this case I want to know who considers whom to be a hopeless fruitloop or a pathetic lackey of the patriarchy.