What is a "Feminist?"

[cowgirl]

Faust, I really appreciate this post of yours because it helps to illuminate what you’re saying. However, I think you’re missing a key aspect of “feminism” which AHunter has been trying to describe, namely, that you’re treating it as a monolithic entity. For example:

@Faust.

You can deny it all you want, but feminism minimizes other inequities, such as racial inequities.

I agree completely with this as long as you replace “feminism” with something along the lines of “20th Century North American liberal feminism.” Many feminists (such as the aforementioned radical feminists, poststructural feminists, third world feminists, etc) very much do not minimize racial inequities. Please see bell hooks for an example, a feminist who makes the exact criticism you do. In particular her seminal book Ain’t I a Woman was precisely about how she was expected, under the feminist theory she was learning in the US in the 1970s, to subjugate her blackness to her womanness.

Gender differences are huge along racial lines. I read “Reviving Ophelia” for a class and the professor pointed out how it was biased towards upper middle class white girls. Since then I have realized how feminism in general is biased towards upper middle class white girls, minimizing the very different issues affecting females in different classes and races, and the definition you use is part of the way you are able to hide that fact.

He is not hiding any fact. The realization about the bias of “feminism in general” is again, not yours alone, and also, refers to a specific flavour of feminism and ignores huge bodies of work which have already made this critique in extensive detail.

Different issues affecting females in different classes and races have been hugely explored in many different (race, class, ability, sexuality, nationality, employability, etc) contexts by many people who call themselves “feminists.” Chandra Mohanty, for instance, is a postcolonial feminist (who may be close enough to “poststructural” to raise AHunter’s objections, but she does demonstrate the point) who harshly criticises writers like Betty Friedan for celebrating “women’s liberation” for a certain type of woman (ie rich, white) on the backs of other women (eg her poor, black, non-status maid).

The definition is also simply false. You would not say that someone isn’t a feminist because they believe that fit mothers should get custody of their children. Yet giving fit mothers custody is certainly not “equality for everyone.”

I think you’re glossing over a premise in this argument. I don’t see the connectin between feminism, fit mothers, and equality for everyone.

Feminism is sort of the equivalent of being white. White people don’t really think about their race - they consider themself the “default.”

Completely agree - again, as long as you qualify “feminism” to something about the white, middle class American movement. You must qualify it as such because many, many feminists have made the exact same argument as you and it is not fair or intellectually honest to group them together.

That is why some define feminism as equality for everyone. They don’t even see the problem with that. Transexuals, men, other races… none of these are best served by defining feminism as equality for all. Yet I realize that you can’t see that.

He can, which is why he didn’t define feminism as equality for all. One way he defined feminism is as anti-patriarchy, a definition which would most definitely serve transsexuals, men, people of ‘other’ races. (I needn’t remind you not to consider white as the default race, right?)

[js_africanus]

I’ve just started reading Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide by Bowell & Kemp. In the first chapter they’re discussing several points, including linguistic phenomena because “phenomena in ordinary language sometimes make [the task of understand authors’ intent] more difficult because they obscure…writers’ intended message…”

An example under the heading “primary and secondary connotation” is the word feminism, which has a primary connotation that is “difficult to pin down” and “is full of secondary connotations that can be used to the rhetorical advantage of both those who support and those who oppose feminism.”

[Walloon]

@Johanna

Religious fundies are the groups I point my finger at who are actively determined to get women back in the kitchen. The Christian, Hindu, and Islamic fundies are the worst at this.

As Miller asked in #19, can you name a non-fringe religious organization that opposes equal rights under the law for women?

[Johanna]

I was thinking of the Southern Baptist convention ordering wives to be obedient to their husbands, of the Promise Keepers teaching men to be authoritarian husbands, of Wahhabi missionaries in America who impose absolute subjection and subservience on all women. This is “under the law” in the sense of under religious law. That is not quite the sense in which you guys were asking; the commonly understood meaning of “under law” is under civil or secular law. I understood that, and my concern is the power of such mullas like the Southern Baptist Convention to directly influence the ruling party’s politics. History shows again and again how the power informally accorded mullas (whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim) over legislation is channeled into family law, i.e. politically satisfy the mullas on the backs of women. Throw them a female bone. They won’t bug you so much then when you want to get back to trade agreements and tax cuts, where the money is, where it’s always business as usual. When authoritarian ideologies advance their agenda, they often go after women’s status. I live in Virginia, where the legislature has been passing the most hostile legislation in the country against gay rights. I have every reason for alarm at the potential threat to roll back rights, including women’s rights.

You asked for a “non-fringe” group that is against women’s rights under law. You have probably heard of Rushdoony and Dominionist Christianity, since it’s been a topic here in GD before. If you know what this bunch is about, would you classify them as “fringe”? Yes on the basis that it’s an extremist theocratic ideology, or no on the basis that it has an influence on some Republicans in the government?