For the love of women’s liberation
Originally published at ABC’s The Drum.
I don’t call myself a feminist. But some of my best friends are feminists.
Some women don’t like the descriptor, and reject it because they don’t want to be associated with a certain stereotype. Or because they believe in countries like Australia there is gender equality now. Neither of these reasons is why I shy away from the label.
I originally abandoned the tag because I don’t agree with what is called patriarchy theory, with which feminism has been inexorably associated (especially inside the academy and social movements). Although that is in many ways an abstract debate, and I tended not to correct people who saw me as under the feminist umbrella.
More recently I have become irritated with the term, because ‘feminist’ increasingly has little specificity. As Nina Power argues in One Dimensional Woman, the term ‘feminist’ (and indeed the wider feminist project) has been stripped of much of its sharpness and liberatory potential.
Protected: LADYCAVE DISCUSSIONS
One Year On
On Monday it will be a year since my father took his own life. Since his death I have been thinking about writing about it, but felt the barrier of years of professional discipline insisting “what is the purpose of this piece? What do you want to convey?” I still don’t have an answer to those questions, and yet I feel I must write, so here it is. I think it’s just to bear witness, a process I believe in wholeheartedly, and to help me with my grief. But if you want to see the roots of my feminism and why I believe the personal is political, it’s here too. I’m not trying to give you a lesson or a message, but if you get something from reading, I’m glad.
How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving? I don’t know and really it’s a pointless question, because what I do know is that death happens to us all, and grief just is, and it will be. It is a physiological process as much as anything else that we dress it up as with our culture and plethora of abstract ideas, and our art. It is moving through me and with me, and I must and want to travel with it.
A Cosmopolitan Morality
Intolerance is central to parochialism. It is anathema to a cosmopolitan society. On this we can surely agree. What if I say, ‘intolerance of religion is just as problematic as the intolerance of atheism’? Still with me?
Arguments that point to the long history of structures of power held by religious institutions are important, though the power keeps shifting in a so-called secular state. But such power is still manifest even in Australia, such as in the case of the religio-legislative stranglehold on the same-sex marriage debate. And it’s only ‘common sense’ that an anti-choice position on abortion is linked to religious views, as they certainly dominate that side of the debate. I’ll return to that ‘common sense’ later.
However, I fail to see how Melinda Tankard Reist’s anti-porn work has anything to do with her religion, and find it incredibly reductive to dismiss her arguments on that basis. It is a sleight of hand (and an ad hominem one) to say ‘I disagree with her anti-porn work because she’s a fundie Baptist and by the way you know she’s pro-life/anti-choice?!’ The logical fallacies therein are pretty obvious, and yet they’ve currently been amplified-while-under-analysed due to MTR’s (ill-advised, in my opinion) decision to threaten a blogger with defamation for pointing out her alleged membership of a Baptist church and suggesting she has been duplicitous about her religious affiliation. While I stand solidly in the camp of those decrying the legal threat, I’d like to examine the things that MTR probably should have argued instead of trying to silence the blogger.
Framing Occupy, Homelessness, Solidarity
Ron Paul: next president or protofascist?
Cross posted from Overland Magazine Blog
There’s a joke on the new tumblr, Shit Liberals Say ToRadicals, that goes, ‘Sure, Obama’s not perfect, but consider thealternative.’ Followed by the fine print, ‘I did, it’s called socialism.’
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