Section I: Who gets to call themselves a feminist?
That is a hotly debated topic. Some people will tell you men can’t be feminist;others will tell you a different story. A feminist to one person is not a feminist to another. Especially in the age of oversaturated media culture and postmodernism, definitions of feminism are becoming relatively unstable and highly contested.
Section II: A(VERY) Brief History of Feminism
Narrating the history of feminism ,like narrating the history of anything, isn’t particularly easy. In the process of narration lies the power to shape reality and knowledge. It might sound meta and abstract, but it’s from this vantage point that we can begin to understand the stakes in addressing the history of feminism. As emphasized, this is a rather brief history of feminism. This narration serves as a starting point, not the dead end.
One way of looking at the history of feminism is through the concept of waves. Waves of feminism is an approach of looking at feminism through particular historical moments. Each wave is theorized around certain social advances, ideologies, and varying conceptions of what it meant to be a feminist. Typically, feminist history conceptualizes three or four waves of feminism.
First-Wave feminism has its roots in urban cities around the 19th century. Some historians paint the beginning of first-wave feminism as the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. This wave of feminism was dedicated to challenging the political hegemony of men by having women embrace activities typically associated with White masculinity such as politics, public speaking, and education. First-wave feminism attempted to tackle the “cult of domesticity” that often centered middle-class and bourgeoisie White women.
Second-Wave feminism pulls its beginnings from the political stamina and social changes advocated by the Civil Rights Movement and other key watershed moments from the 60s through early 90s. Second-Wave feminism blends ideas and inspiration from a variety of similar social movements such as the sexual revolution, Black Power, and Gay Liberation. Much of the focus of this wave of feminism was invested in sexual liberation, the inclusion of women of color and gays and lesbians, and the separation of gender from sex, one of the most critical achievements of second-wave feminism.
Third-Wave feminism came to the scene in the mid-90s to late-90s with even more radical ideas about patriarchy, femininity and gender broadly. Theorists from this era such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and bell hooks destabilize the idea of a static notion of womanhood. These scholars and more argued for an understanding of womanhood that blurred the distinctions between feminine and masculine, preferring a vision of gender that rejects false borders and binaries. Not only in terms of gender, but also race, sexuality, and class. It eschews singularity in favor of multiculturalism and global awareness.
Fourth-Wave feminism is the most current wave of feminism, and the one I consider myself personally a part of. Fourth-Wave feminism’s existence is hotly debated, and some might argue that it’s simply an appendage to third-wave feminism. In a lot of ways, third-wave and fourth-wave feminism share commonalities. Some of these include a focus on intersectionality and difference, empowerment of women and femininity, and queer liberation. However, the use of technology, specifically social media is the biggest difference that marks fourth-wave feminism. Activists reminiscent of this era detail the growing accessibility of feminist knowledge as digital media enables the mass proliferation of feminist works, ideas, and values.
Despite the usefulness of this heuristic, some scholars have pointed to certain deficiencies in thinking of feminism as marked by significant changes and clearly defined breaks. It assumes a feminist genealogy that is linear and fails to see how some issues that feminism pays attention to are cyclical and recurring. In addition, waves of feminism aren’t the only way of conceptualizing different notions of feminism. Terms such as lesbian feminism, Black feminism, and trans feminism imagine feminisms as concerned about particular people, cultures, and subjects. These feminisms are often neglected, forgotten about, and not taken as seriously despite the valuable contributions they bring.
Lesbian feminism, bearing connections with radical feminism, demonstrates an identification with what the Radicalesbians call the “woman-identified woman.” This is a woman that loves other women. This love transcends sexual desire, although that could be a part of it. Lesbian feminism is about empowering women to center other women, not men. In recent years, the influence of Lesbian feminism has waned particularly with the rise of postmodernism, queer theory, and the proliferation of digital media that blurs gender boundaries. Even still, the legacy of Lesbian feminism continues to remain relevant as evidenced by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed writing about its importance in her recent 2017 book Living a Feminist Life.
Black feminism, unlike Lesbian feminism, lacks a stable history from where to pull from. Part of this has to deal with the ways that feminism oftentimes had unwritten rules about which women it was talking about. For example, early suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony were vehemently racist and only cared about the ability of White women to vote, not others. Even as African-Americans gained increasing rights and political stamina from the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power, Black women’s specific contributions were often minimized. This led Black women to seek to carve out their own space to address issues that affect Black girls and women, but also Black men such as the relationships between racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Black feminism was for the betterment of everyone.
Trans feminism has been causing a violent stir of emotions in the hearts of many old-school feminist. Dubbing themselves Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists(TERFS), these groups of feminist oppose trans identity and attempt to isolate trans women away from the larger feminist movement. Many of these feminists deny trans women access to womanhood through accusations such as “male socialization” and “male privilege.” While these are very real phenomena that should not simply be discarded, these notions need to be deeply problematized.Trans woman activist and biologist Julia Serano proves this in her seminal 2007 text Whipping Girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity.
Serano argues that many of the claims of TERFS are based around what she calls “traditional sexism” and “oppositional sexism.” Traditional sexism is the definition most people usually associate with men and masculinity dominating over women and femininity. Oppositional sexism refers to the idea that men/masculinity and women/femininity are opposite and adversarial to another. These frameworks of traditional and oppositional sexism are what make trans women unintelligible to TERFS. TERFS see trans women as males masquerading as women, which disrupts notions of maleness/masculinity as being superior to femaleness/femininity. It also troubles the notion that maleness/masculinity and femaleness/femininity are opposites or “oppositional” to one another.
Trans women are women. Period.
Despite what TERFS might articulate, Serano’s own argument proves that TERFS are simply repacking sexist notions of gender for their claims of feminism. They refuse to recognize the complexity of gender in favor of enforcing strict, violent boundaries that value cisgender identities over trans and non-binary gender identities.
Section III: Conclusion
Who gets to call themselves a feminist? As this very brief history of feminism has shown us, the definitions of feminism are constantly evolving. Feminism is for girls, boys, men, women, and enbies. Feminism is for Black and Indigenous people. Feminism is for trans women. As late Black feminist scholar bell hooks tells us, “Feminism is for everybody.”
