Are you a feminist? The word made me uneasy for a long time: I believed, strongly, that patriarchal domination existed in a hundred little ways around me, but some of the dialogues addressing these issues felt wrong. An all-female Ghostbusters, Katy Perry’s maybe-satirical but still over-sexualized song “Woman’s World”… does this mean equality? It left a bad taste in my mouth.
This discomfort was a primer for my journey of learning that there are different definitions of feminism, including ones that move beyond the idea that ‘girls can do anything boys can do.’ More and more I find myself unhappy with ‘liberal’ or ‘reformist’ feminism — built from a foundational belief that any individual (in this case any woman) will be equal if they can succeed within our current systems. Female CEOs! But this is flawed because our current systems — economic, cultural, political — rely on the exploitation of underprivileged groups.
As celebrated American scholar bell hooks outlines in her book Feminism is for Everybody: “Feminist revolution alone will not create such a world [free of domination]; we need to end racism, class elitism, imperialism […] Most women, especially privileged white women, ceased even to consider revolutionary feminist visions, once they began to gain economic power within the existing social structure.”
There are countless examples of the ways interlocking oppressions serve a small, privileged group. Female CEOs heading billion-dollar corporations will not mean equality for minimum-wage employees generating that surplus.
In honor of Women’s History Month, I urge you to look into your own life and ask in what ways you might be benefiting from or underserved by the systems of power around you. Equality justice impacts everyone — that is the feminism I work towards.
