repoliticizing feminism

As the new year begins, and I take on a professional role I’m very excited about, I’m thinking a great deal about the current identity crisis of feminism in our culture, which has come to mean so many different things to so many different people (often things that reinforce rather than resist or challenge patriarchal, capitalist aspects of our culture). I feel there is a real need to redefine and repoliticize feminism. Here are quotes from Masha Tupitsyn’s post One-Dimensional Women on One-Dimensional Feminism.

Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman:

“The political imagination of contemporary feminism is at a standstill. The perky, upbeat message of self-fulfillment and consumer emancipation masks a deep inability to come to terms with serious transformations in the nature of work and culture. For all its glee and excitement, the self-congratulatory feminism that celebrates individual identity above all else is a one-dimensional feminism…If feminism takes [the] opportunity to shake off its current imperialist and consumerist sheen it could once again place its vital transformative political demands center-stage, and shuffle off its current one-dimensionality for good.” 

bell hooks, from “Love As The Practice of Freedom”:

“…Many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change.”

As bell hooks points out, feminism is part of an ecology of love and social justice that is both individual and collective–political, personal, and social–and women aren’t just feminists because they have to be, or until they have to be, but because they want to be and should be–always and ongoing. Because it makes the world better for everyone (to quote bell hooks, “feminism is for everybody.” See also Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”), not just for “yourself” or “me.”

…as Nina Power puts it in One-Dimensional Woman, the word feminism itself these days has been so bastardized–used for everything and by everybody–for the most cynical, self-serving, and often incompatible reasons (“causes”). Both the word, and the struggle as a whole, have to be reimagined, redefined, radically repoliticized, and rescued from the miasma of consumer capitalism, as its come to mean everything and nothing–a promiscuous label that anyone can purchase with no real commitment or accountability. First the word feminism was shamed and demonized by the patriarchal media, so that no one would even use it, or associate with it anymore for fear of risking alienation. Then consumer capitalism figured out a better way, as it has with everything else: corrupt and co-opt the word and the radical (transformative) potential of feminism so completely that, sure, you can use it, and even be it, but it won’t have any disruptive or transgressive power anymore. 

It seems clear to me that one of the great problems facing modern feminism is the way that people often mean by “feminism” what Nina Power describes as “a self-congratulatory feminism that celebrates individual identity above all else.” As bell hooks says here in a conversation with Laverne Cox at The New School last year, “If feminism is all things to all people, then what is it? How do we locate it as a radical political movement in our lives if everybody just makes of it….which doesn’t mean that we should demonize, but we do have to be clear about, what are the boundaries?”