Serenity… an expedition

Doesn’t that question puzzle you? It did me, when I first heard it. And every time since. My reaction when I first heard it was – well, what isn’t a feminist issue?

I think that question – and the context in which it is usually posed, whether as an inquiry in comments or  precursor to an explanation of why in a post – has done more to turn me off of mainstream or white feminism than all the race and other issues combined. It’s that question and what it says about the state of feminist teachings that makes me question whether this is something I want to be identified with or not. And the conclusion, which so many others have come to is mostly “not”.

Yet… I hate to give up the label of  “feminist”. It’s been *my* word for so long. Just as I was born in the shadow of the Civil Rights movement, I was also raised in the backwash of the Women’s Liberation Movement. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was young (I am 51 now) and – because I didn’t know any better, not really having had access to the feminist theory at the time or any other than life feminists of various hues and education levels  – had molded the meaning of the word to fit my belief’s perfectly. The belief that women are at the center of everything in life and that little can be accomplished in a sustainable way in any area – human rights, social justice, healthcare, environmental justice, education, food and water scarcity, labor movements, upward mobility – just about anything at all, without positioning women and their rights and needs at the center.  With women of color and other marginalized folks at the center of even that.  Everything else (in my way of thinking) flows both to and from this.

I quite liked considering myself a feminist, no matter the guff I took from boys and men, or women who thought it was little more than a dirty word. I suppose it’s a sadness – and an irony – that it took meeting actual, professional “top of the tree” feminists to finally convince me that I wasn’t one.

Perhaps not so oddly, I don’t see women of color  asking the dreaded question (not to say that none have or do, just not in my experience). I imagine that’s partially because we dwell in the intersections and thus are used to looking every which way as opposed to being so narrowly focused only on what affects us personally, but is there more to it than that? It may be that our lives (or those of people we know and/or love) are often lived so close to the nexus that we have no other choice than to realize that it all affects us, as women. We fix it all or die.

I don’t know. We (woc) have no special majik or anything, and we certainly can get things wrong, forget to listen to the people closest to the issues (with no harmful intent, but we all know how much good that does), possibly apply the wrong prescription – particularly those of us who are still trying to deal with our western privilege – but even if we get it wrong (at first) I just haven’t seen anyone have to explain why we should try to get it at all.

So, yep, I’m still wondering… what isn’t a feminist issue?

(picture at top from the Brooklyn Museum)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under edited to add, feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.