What Shakesville Said

Shakesville: We Write Letters

This blog resolves to acknowledge our social privileges without defensiveness, to welcome the comments and contributions of socially marginalised voices, and when our work builds on the ideas of others we will fully attribute our debt to their work.

We will no doubt get it wrong at times. Call us on it. We will listen. We may, in the end, still disagree with some criticisms, but these disagreements will be discussed respectfully and we will still be your allies.

Update May 2nd 2008 – Related Post:
Feminism Friday: When Women Who Advocate For Women’s Rights Reject The Label Feminist – links to many discussions on the shortcomings of mainstream feminism when dealing with matters of race and racism especially. That post was updated May 2nd, 2008 to include some of the excellent posts written in the last few weeks.

Feminism Friday: When women who advocate for women’s rights reject the label “feminist”

2nd May 2008: This post has been updated in light of the recent flare-ups in the rounds of discussion about how mainstream feminism remains inadequate in engaging with matters of race. See footnote.

There are many critics who view “feminism” (and the progressive movement generally) as focussing too much on the West, and too much on the experience and goals of the white middle-class, to the detriment of the experiences and goals of non-white women, poorer women and non-Western women.

It’s hard to deny that the most public faces and voices of the feminist movement – popularisers and academic theorists – have been and remain mostly white, middle-class Western women.

[link no longer valid]¹brownfemipower describes how she first realised this as a student:

But Andy started class off with something different. She asked us to tell her everything we knew about feminism. We told her all about Seneca Falls and Susan B. Anthoney and Gloria Steinem–and some of us even told her about NOW or Feminist Majority or bell hooks or Alice Walker. One person mentioned Adrienne Rich.

She asked us what we knew about “the waves” of feminism. At least half of the class raised their hands.

Then she asked us what we thought women of color were doing during all the ‘waves’.

All of the hands went down and we all just stared at each other. One person finally said, “Well, we said Alice Walker,” to which Andy replied, What do you know about Alice Walker?

Everybody replied “The Color Purple” and then we lapsed back into silence.

Then the big question came. “Why do you only know about white women?”

Now, I’ll admit, at that point, I was feeling very very defensive. Most of the women in the class were women of color–I think there were a total of three white women in the class if I remember right. Every other person was either black, native or Latina. But in spite of this diverse class dynamic, I could tell most of us were feeling pretty defensive. We’d just been shown in the period of about 10 minutes how much we’d been completely bought into a particular definition of “feminism”–and even more so, we’d just been exposed to our vast ignorance of our own histories.

So, does this mean that the feminist movement is defined by these white, middle-class public faces? If that is the movement’s history and current “branding”, must it continue to be?

Feminism Friday Round-Up

As usual, not all of these posts have actually been tagged as Feminism Friday articles by their authors, but if a post appears to fit into the category I include it. Please add any other online articles you think fit the bill from the last few weeks in comments.

Amanda Marcotte is out of the gate early this week with this fabulous post: On pigs, basketball, frames, and music

I’d say the two major metaphorical frames about sex would be the conservative-sexist one and the liberal-feminist one. The conservative-sexist metaphorical framework of sex is Sex As Conquest. In this frame, women’s bodies are objects and sex is about the struggle to conquer the pussy. Sometimes the struggle over the pussy is between men (ex: jokes about fathers guarding their daughters’ bodies from young male interlopers) and sometimes women themselves are tasked with defending the pussy from sex. If sexual intercourse happens, by definition, the man who gets to fuck the woman has won and the defender (father or woman herself) has lost. Sex happens when women surrender, in this model.

The liberal-feminist view of sex is that it’s not a war or a game, but more of a mutual collaboration, less like a battle and more like playing music. In this model, to be a sexual person is to be a musician and sex is playing your instrument. Sometimes you play by yourself, sometimes you get with others and jam, and sometimes you actually have a band that you have a long-term relationship with. There aren’t winners and losers, but there can be good and bad sex, just like there can be good and bad music. The collaboration model of sex explains why acceptance of homosexuality and kinkiness are generally liberal views. It makes no more sense to call homosexuality immoral than it does to posit that rock is more moral than jazz; it’s all a matter of taste. Homosexuality creates a lot of grief to those who have a fairly strict conservative view of sex because you can’t even tell who’s supposed to be the offense and the defense. It’s simply outside of their model, and it creates cognitive dissonance, which often makes the person suffering it want to wipe out the source of the dissonance.

These separate models of what sex is explain why threads about rape turn into hellholes pretty quickly—sexists and feminists aren’t even speaking the same language, in a sense.

Thinking Girl has posted excerpts from a thesis by Shannon called the Domestic Goddess Series over the last few weeks:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

A recent addition to the ranks of Feminism Friday bloggers, elorie at Same As A Wildcat has been writing on-topic essays for the last few weeks – here’s her Feminism Friday archive.

Bluemilk takes on Sex and Breastfeeding.

Lauredhel looks at Feminist Ethics and Digital Communities.