On feminism

Faux white-chocolat-because-you're-worth-it feminism is teared to pieces in this blog entry. I couldn't agree more with the following insight: "Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamanté phone cover."

For me, feminism is about revealing and elucidating things in ours lives, things we would rather leave unacknowledged. Feminism is about truth, how we perceive the world and ourselves. Perception of possibilities and of change. Feminism is not theoretical. Even though it might sometimes be difficult to approach gender issues, this difficulty is of a moral, rather than theoretical, nature.

Feminism is about scrutinizing why it is that a specific issue is gendered, why something has a gendered meaning. An example: think about the gendered pictures associated with the idea that motherhood is a major change in a person's life. Think about the following concepts and the images they conjure up: sassy, respectable, provocative, ugly, fag, breast, adolescence, hormones, fireman, lipstick, diesel motor. I don't intend to say that concepts have an inherent, fixed meaning. Neither are concepts simply the results of conventions ("well, I choose not to see it as gendered even tho' most would!). What I were rather thinking of is the way we talk about lipstick, brests, diesel motors and hormones. And what sense something has is to be seen against the background of a life*. Referring to Tarantino once again: in Death Proof he plays with the idea of what a professional stuntman looks like - and the pictures that don't seem to "fit in". One critic on IMDB bemoaned Tarantino's lack of realism by appealing to the contraction between "a bunch of girls" and "fung fu stunts"!

Some claim feminism to be beyond politics (Swedish politicians, sometimes, seem to think along those lines). For them, feminism is exhausted by the term 'equality'. I think equality has a role, but not an exhaustive one. Gender permeats our lives in ways that are not made visible if sexism and injustices due to gender are depicted as something that can be fixed by some institutional changes.

If we are ready to challenge how we understand gender, that means we have to challenge many other things as well. Gender is not a tidy box. Maybe that is what feminists have had in mind in coining the term 'intersectionality' but then again, why do we need a technical term for this simple fact?

One of the few texts that have really challenged me to think, shaken me, battered me, is Valerie Solana's SCUM Manifesto. Her text contains many layers and it is packed with irony, metaphors, references and jokes. It is nonetheless a serious text. Or: this is the way I read the text, you might read it differently. The SCUM Manifesto is a text about me and you and the world. Solanas is angry, analytic, witty, furious, sarcastic - but at the same time she is open for hope and love. If she has a thesis, it is this: being a 'woman' and 'a man' is something we've done to ourselves, it is something we have forced upon ourselves and upon others. She understands gender as a form of ever-lasting project by which we become the beings we are now. "The male" is dependent on "the female" - masculinity is "strenght" and "intellect" but behind all this are beings who want to masqurade themselves as "strong" and "intellectual" and doing this is, of course, a way of relating to others, the others being "weak", "female", "bodily". Solanas toys with gender concepts; on the surface she might resemble an essentialist, "men are weak, not strong", but what she is doing is, rather, taking the whole thing apart by means of a form of dialectical reasoning. Dialectical, that is, referring to the juxtaposition of concepts, put side by side. She discloses "femininity" and "masculinity" from a perspective of how these concepts make a difference. She is, as it were, rooting gender in a history of violence.

Pictures of gender, life and politics are thrown into her conceptual mill and after grinding (we are grinded!), we will not be able to return to being "daddy's girls" or "strong men" anymore. She writes about gender as a form of self-deception and her project is, in a way, to make us stop deceiving ourselves, to make us see the world as it is. Her manifesto can be compared to Nitzschean ideas about self-deception - there are a lot of similarities here. The difficulty of reading Solanas is quite the same as the problems one encounters when reading Nietzsche. They share the same kind of brutality. And many times such a brutality is exactly what is needed. But at other times the rampage of brutality is all too invincible when facing another person.

The changes she envisions are not easy; they are violent and hard. But it is up to the reader to interpret what the nature of "violence" here is. Solanas digs in a heap of (bull)shit, but she comes out alive - or does she? Do we? Can we? Read the manifesto here.

* Sorry, this is a Wittgensteinian cliché I cannot resist employing here.