This made me very sad: "WHY I’M LEAVING FEMINISM"

[Catherina]

It made me sad because, well you all know just as well why.


WHY I’M LEAVING FEMINISM

8 March, 2011 – 10:08 am
By s.e. smith
Posted in social justice, Tagged ableism, classism, oppression, racism, social justice, transphobia


I spent a long time refusing to identify as a feminist. I repeated the arguments I’d absorbed from the culture around me about what feminism was, a movement gone ‘too far’ led by a crew of hysterical hairy-legged harridans. But I still believed that women didn’t have equality, that we needed to fight for the rights of all members of society to have an equal and fair chance, and I started finding out what feminists thought feminism was all about and I started calling myself one too. After all, who wouldn’t want to be part of a movement that thinks, on a fundamental level, that women are people?

As I entered the feminist movement, I started finding out more about what the mainstream elements of feminism were really about. A movement led by people from a very specific demographic, primarily concerned with the interests of that demographic. A movement that can and would do anything to advance itself, even over the backs of other women. A movement that does so routinely, casually, and evidently without any regrets. An academic industrial complex, as Jessica Yee puts it.

One of the rotating taglines on this site used to read ‘(everything) is a feminist issue’ because I used to believe that, and I thought other feminists did too. ‘This is not our fight,’ they tell me, when I try to integrate class, race, gender, disability, religion, national origins, environmental degradation, into the feminist movement. ‘Your issues,’ they tell me, ‘are not important right now but we will get to them eventually.’ The feminists who want to work in solidarity with us are too few in number, are unable to push back against the tide.

The feminist movement does not believe I am a human being. It dehumanises me. It uses my body and my lived experiences for its own ends and throws me away when it’s done. I am something disposable; I am the sacrificial planking on the hull of the feminist movement. It took me a long time to learn that I was being left out for the sea worms to eat, not actually playing an integral role in the movement, to learn that, fundamentally, many people believed that ‘my issues’ were not feminist.

My ‘issues’ being things like the rape of people in institutions, the fact that the average transgender person can expect to live for 23 years, forcible institutionalisation of people whom society doesn’t want to look at, ridiculously high domestic violence and sexual assault rates for transgender people and people with disabilities. The widening pay gap between white women and women of colour, the fact that the median net worth for Black women is $5. The fact that fat patients die without treatment due to fat hatred in the medical community. The fact that industrial pollution disproportionately impacts communities of colour, that class mobility is at an all time low, that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer, that protections for worker safety are steadily being eroded, that unions are under attack in the United States.

...

http://meloukhia.net/2011/03/why_im_leaving_feminism.html



A little bit about the author

My focus as an essayist, journalist, and activist is on social issues, with credits in publications like The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, AlterNet, Jezebel, Longshot Magazine, Global Comment, xoJane, Truthout, and Reproductive Health Reality Check. A cofounder of FWD/Forward: Feminists with disabilities for a way forward, I continue to contribute to feminist discussion at Tiger Beatdown and am a member of the Guardian Comment Network. Additionally, I maintain a personal website, this ain’t livin’, with regular posts on a spectrum of topics from Chinese-American history to environmental justice.

I'd really like to invite her here. What do you think?

Her website is my new favorite. It's rich and profound.