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Women in the ForegroundJanuary 17, 2007 So I spent the whole morning writing, but without even opening Squatters' Speakeasy. The major project was reading and augmenting the prepared-for-publication transcript of a panel I was on at WisCon last May, the near and dear to my heart "What Would a Feminist Think Tank Look Like?" This was one of the biggies on my "to-do" list. (The fact that I'm actually keeping a "to-do" list may be a sign of impending maturity, or it may be an indication that I'm afraid that my life is on the verge of out-of-control.) Warming up for that, I wandered over to Why Being a Feminist Does Not Mean Backing All Women, an essay by Gloria Steinem that was just posted to AlterNet. Well. First I had a hard time believing that any feminist thinks that feminism means "backing all women." A big advantage of living in a women's community, working in a women's bookstore, volunteering at a women's newspaper, etc., is that you see the vast range of behaviors of which female people are capable. It ain't always pretty. If you come in with soft-focus illusions about sisterhood, you'll lose 'em PDQ. Women can guilt-trip, bullshit, manipulate, and generally fuck up at least as well as men can. In the 1980s the one thing women's communities lacked that male-inclusive communities had in great quantities was physical violence. That may have changed. Although, and perhaps because, I needed to get down to this think tank transcript, I posted a reply. Here it is, recycled but, I hope, still edible. * * * Ms. Steinem wrote:
This is a pretty good formulation of liberal feminism as practiced in the U.S. of A., but there's more to feminism than that. Distilled down to one sentence, feminism is a worldview that puts women in the foreground. No other major political theory, philosophy, or theology does this. We're so used to the idea that men are in the foreground and women in the back (or completely off-stage) that this requires both imagination and courage. Over the years I've noticed that the feminist thinkers who get bashed the hardest (by women as well as men, need I say -- including other feminists) are the ones whose theories and strategies put women in the foreground and devote minimal or no attention to making men comfortable. A feminist who puts women in the foreground -- not just one or two women, or just women of a particular class or country -- won't have much trouble figuring out why she's under no obligation to uncritically support Condoleezza Rice -- or Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi for that matter. (Why didn't Steinem mention them?? Her essay would have been stronger if she hadn't picked such easy targets.) As long as the political structure is patriarchal (i.e., it assumes that men are entitled to the foreground), women have strong incentives not to put women first.
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