This is something that I have been thinking about and going back and forth on with a close friend of mine.
Here’s the deal: Feminism, or at least the Third Wave is supposedly all about telling stories, raising voices and finding a space of inclusion through deconstruction. Much of what is happening as a result of this ‘new feminist activism’, however, is more alienation and division than ever before. We are now living in a world where womanists, ecofeminists, liberal feminists, socialist feminists, radical feminists, post-colonial and third world feminists, french feminists, post-structural and post-modern feminists, multiracial feminists, libertarian feminists, and the list goes on and on, all claim to be true feminists, who have adopted the ideology that will free women and make for the best society, while attempting to silence all other “feminist” voices as not being as productive or meaningful as theirs.
The theoretical beginings of the feminist movement, and its third reincarnation, spout off idealistic rhetoric of a full standpoint, within which all aspects of an individual’s multitude of momentary and long-term idenities are brought into a senes of critical and optimal consciousness to deconstruct all power relations within the heirarchies and ideologies that intersect to construct societies. There are not many problems with standpoint theory its self that I would want to note, but instead wth the attitudinal practice that is using this theoretical approach to silence those who disagree with not only feminist mindsets and limited consciousness, but also with the dominant racist, capitalist patriarchy we like to call ‘the norm’. Read the rest of this entry »
