Monday, May 21, 2007

I feel like our movement isn't going forward much. As I have told everyone who will listen, I'm reading Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women. It's nice to read the original works of feminists of other waves because they give you primary source material for how the development of feminist thought has gone. Even though this book seems to have been originally written in 1978, Dworkin is still going into a great deal of detail about the abuses against black women on welfare and testing of contraceptives that may have been dangerous on women of color in different countries. So to me, it seems that by 2006, we should go past the simple 'we mentioned women of color now what more could you want" idea into not centering the discussion of feminism around white women and white women's concerns.

While media analysis can be a useful skill, it can be annoying to read tons of posts about how horrible Quiznos commercials are, when you can just pick up the paper and read about babies dying in unsafe daycares and you know that the system is set up to keep replicating these atrocities. Also, while whether feminists think your lipgloss is cute may be a central concern of white women, it'd be nice to keep sight of the fact that many other women would like things like clean drinking water or not being raped or not getting AIDs through prostitution engaged in because of a structural lack of well paying jobs for women. I'm not trying to silence your deep night of the soul about how totally hard it is to be totally cute and popular and still be a feminist, just remember that women who pay attention are thinking 'what the fuck? with what's going on in my community, that's your big feminist issue!?"

We should have moved from the simplistic view of all women as being in a universal sisterhood and moved towards integrating the views and possibilities of the majority of the women on earth instead of the petty worries of the rich and the white.

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