viva voce: What My Feminist Agenda Looks Like

Thursday, July 29, 2010

viva voce: What My Feminist Agenda Looks Like

lenachen:
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I’m not going to regurgitate all of Women’s Studies 101 here, but the third-wave arose from the fact that many women felt excluded or even thrown under the bus by second-wavers. The struggle for contraception and reproductive rights allowed White women to choose to not have…

I want to quote this part, too:

I reject the argument that feminists can’t fight for women and for poor, queer, disabled, and non-White people. Because guess what? Many women are poor, queer, disabled, and non-White. For them, being part of the latter means many more disadvantages and much more discrimination than just being a woman. A feminist agenda has to recognize that women are not simply all oppressed in the exact same way because they share a gender. A feminist agenda has to recognize that some women are oppressors themselves, that the advancement of some women may come at others’ expense, that gender oppression is particularly damaging for women who are already disadvantaged in other ways, that these disadvantages are not side concerns but of primary importance. A feminist agenda only concerned with “women” as an abstract class of people is not a feminist agenda I can stand behind.

Fuck yeah, intersectionality.