Are You A Good Feminist or A Bad Feminist ?
I had been at an impasse, trying to think of how I was going to word what I'll be attempting to word now. I have been working on a proposal for the past few days for a show that deals with the idea of not being a good enough feminist. The title is funny - it makes me think of the guilt complex of women who just want to slap on a bit of makeup or look at a fashion magazine without the voices of Germaine Greer and Andrea Dworkin screaming in the back of their heads of how they have betrayed the " cause ". It also brings me back to my own undergraduate memories of talking with professors who had really been in the front lines of the movement and had fought tooth and nail to be respected and taken seriously as much as their male counterparts. But as the topic would venture towards making feminist work, the conversation would always spiral, like Icarus plummeting into the sea - fast and downward.
I wont extrapolate for long, but often the conversations would end up as monologues. Reckless claims of what " a real feminist and real feminism " were ended up casually tossed around. As a woman in my twenties, I could have no idea what it was like to understand the battles that they had endured ( that is true ) and that because of them, all the hard work had been done ( how I wish that was true ). Beauty was deemed suspicious and emotion was rendered obsolete - there was a certain worshipping at the altar of hard lined intellect and brutishness. Women were expected to act like men - to play with the big boys. As you may imagine, it left one feeling that feminism just wasn't something that women of my generation could understand struggling with or didn't have the interest in carrying on.
And of course, thats really problematic. As a self-identified feminist and an artist making what I felt and still feel is " feminist " work, that conversation, if not ones I was later exposed to, often showed me what the inherent weakness in feminism was. It was that it could be too insulated- the overall message of "feminism" was aimed mainly at white, middle class women looking to liberate themselves from generations of misconduct and subservience. This message was good, but in hindsight, also made feminism seem about one battle. Feminism to me encompassed many battles, all the time - that this was not just a movement for women, but for men and about race, class, gender and systematic behavior as a whole.
Patricia Hill Collins book , From Black Power to Hip-Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism , talks about how mainstream feminism isolated WOC because of its cry of " women first ".The intertwining of class, race and sexism is deep. In our first movements towards feminism, it seemed that WOC had to make a choice deemed by the mainstream movement of fighting for women or not at all - very similar of a cry made by Bush in the beginnings of the Iraq war - your'e either with us or against us. And while not damning the efforts made in that time, the efforts were about one main cause - empowering women, indeed were exclusive. Not standing with feminism made you a not feminist - not someone who could see the tiny holes in feminism's ideals that could exclude entire peoples. Yes we will help women, all women, poor women, abused women- ALL WOMEN - yet collective identity politics made things fuzzy in a time , where similar to now, black and white, right and wrong , were enforced. Feminism has to support the idea of the evolving identity - not just of the one the female narrative.
And how does this relate to art ? What do we classify as feminist and not feminist work - and why are the classifications necessary ? I was thinking about Lisa Yuskavage paintings and an interview I was reading whether or not her paintings were an affront to feminism or a tribute to feminism. Because she's a woman, its not part of the gaze, but she's appealing to male gaze. But its about women of a certain size, but its still sexualized-etc. Arguments like these , while interesting, often get to be tit for tat, claiming one ideal of feminism is better than another. Instead of feminism being layered and nuanced, it seems there can be shoe-horning of musts for it to qualify as feminist or not, seemingly putting it in a ghetto of specificities that can leave out work that is also about feminism - just a different aspect of it. Indeed, one artist who I think has always been spectacular at layers, nuance, and multiple, uncomfortable issues, is Kara Walker.
I don't know if Walker considers her work feminist or not, or if she uses that label to define herself personally. Frankly, I don't know if I care. Her work encompasses the incestuous relationships of cultural and social issues - on what speaks loudly and what gets pushed aside. This seems more about the never ending evolving identity of what feminism is - all the things we must be critical and aware of.
" Feminism, if it’s really about gender and not just women …Feminism, to this “feminist, but” means working together through all of the genderist, racist, classist, transphobic, and downright oppressive words still spouting from the mouths of what I consider rather un-feminist feminists, as well as LGBT or queer and trans folks. I’m coming out as a feminist, but declaring that I have huge problems with racism, classism, ableism, trans-phobia, trans exclusion, talking about gender in terms of women and men. "
I think this video explains it better than I may have - the idea that feminism isn't a system of musts - it's an ideology of choices and support for not only for " women's issues " , but LBGT, race, class and yes- even men's issues. Feminism is a natural , organic, living and breathing entity that is about choice - one that is okay with traditional forms of femininity ( another topic, another day ) and similarly okay with those outside of traditional gender roles. All encompassing, all evolving, all for the better. While one must interpret feminism for one's own narrative, its also a good idea to realize that there are other narrative beside one's own.
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