I'm not fully up to speed on the turmoil in the fe...

2009-02-17T20:04:00.000-05:00

I'm not fully up to speed on the turmoil in the feminist blogosphere, so feel free to take this with a good shake of salt.

It seems to me that there's always been a division between white feminists and WOC feminists, dating back to suffrage or maybe even further. The us vs. them mentality underlies everything because so many issues are interpreted as binary when they're really more complicated: man vs. woman, white vs. not, gay vs. straight, poor vs. not, liberal vs. conservative, whatever.

I say this with all sympathy for your connection to the label "feminist," because I also consider myself a feminist. But at the same time, I haven't ever been able to get really engaged with it from an activist perspective. Kind of sad, right? But I think one of the reasons that I've had trouble really embracing the feminist community in some ways has to do with this feeling that it entails a fixed and finite set of values that excludes some of my concerns, and doesn't always allow room for differences of opinion or gray areas. Just a feeling.

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I'm not fully up to speed on the turmoil in the fe...