That's the dorky part. But I realized something today.
Ever since I started interviewing for women's colleges I've resisted the feminist narrative (also my new favorite word) that women are oppressed and there's a glass ceiling. In my life, I have always felt privileged and never felt like there were men holding me back or evaluating me in a particular way because I had different body parts. There were gender stereotypes to deal with, yeah, and I still encounter those ("Girls are more picky than guys in buying shoes"), but it's not like I personally have ever felt like I've been marginalized for any reason.
Because of this, I don't normally define myself as a feminist. I understand the various, numerous, feminist rhetorics that include marginalization, oppression, the need to be Amazons to overcome the male suppressors, and the desire to break away from the patriarchal, western society in order to create a definition of "woman" that isn't totally bound in the gender binary. I get it! And I adhere to it, to a degree, as all feminists do. I'm not saying feminists are evil or should be scorned, and even the definition of "feminist" is problematic because there isn't one, single definition that all women adhere to. Some are like me (I prefer to think I'm either moderate or a humanist interested in women's roles), others are more extreme, others are less extreme.
My real problem is with feminist scholars because the one's that are GOOD are few and far between. The feminist rhetoric that bothers me so much seems to come from their theories and their studies. Recently I did a paper on Women in Vedic India. The usual story is that women were oppressed and little more than receptacles for their husbands' seed and domestic drones. But one writer did an article on menstrual taboos in India and I recoiled. Not only did she employ the whole "oppression, voiceless, rendered helpless" story, but she used the menstrual taboos and twisted the contents of the Vedas (another ancient Indian text) to suggest that, once-upon-a-time, India was matrifocal (women based, focused on mothers) rather than androcentric (all about the guys). It's a common rhetoric, the idea of the Golden Age past (in her case, matrifocal India) that once existed, the crappy present (women in India are still utterly oppressed today), and the Utopian future that can resurrect the Golden Age (women will be more powerful then men because we're more natural and more in tune with nature and can make babies!!). As a feminist the author made it clear that she longed for an age where women were in power, as a scholar she strives, possibly too hard, to create a basis to legitimize that return and I have SERIOUS problems with that.
If there is anything that I long for, in terms of gender theory, culture, economics...anything, it's balance. A balance of power in which both sides are equals. I ask too much, I know, and I agree that women have been bound in a masculine society (white males wrote the western history textbooks, it can't be helped) and need to escape that somehow, but something has to take place, where the stereotype shifts so that men and women are on equal footing in every aspect. Is that even possible?
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