"There's no time," the Director said, "that I can see any assimilation of Gehenna into Alliance ... without the inclusion of humans who think at an angle. You can tape them. You can try to change them. If you don't understand what they are now, how do you understand them when they've come another hundred years, another two hundred on the same course?"
- Forty Thousand in Gehenna, C. J. Cherryh
One of these days I'll see a discussion about how horrible it is that young women today don't identify as feminists that I don't want to quote the last paragraph of Hanisch's "The Personal is Political" at.
That day is not today.
Posted by
Dw3t-Hthr
at
1:51 AM
Labels: bitter cynicism, good woman, imperialism, politics
"Dw3t-Hthr" (Duat-Hether) is a title of various female temple officials in ancient Egypt. It means "Worshipper of Hathor" or "Adorer of Hathor".
For you and me, we hold these truths to be self-evident
For you and me, we'd elect each other president
For you and me
We might agree
But that's just us...
Reaching for the alien shore...
-- Rush, "Alien Shore"
6 comments:
Need tasty context!
Yet another message board thread decrying the phenomenon, talking about how horrible it is, saying things like, "Well, the word means this, if you think this then the word applies to you" without recognising that the word is more an identity trait than a descriptive adjective.
Not enough actually asking why, just assuming that people who don't use the word are ignorant, ungrateful, inexperienced, or similar.
No awareness of the critiques of feminism on racist grounds (which I've been familiarising myself with lately), on class grounds (part of my personal damage), on feminism as the primary force demanding gender conformity in some people's lives (like mine), on the way some feminists actively drive out sex workers or inform some kinky people that 'equal rights for women' means rescuing some women from their own sexualities (because some animals are more equal than others) ... Just rah, rah, identity trait, silly people who don't identity trait!
Never mind that I gave up the identity trait a number of years ago because it was driving a catastrophically destructive depression spiral. My experiences are irrelevant, my sanity can be sacrificed For The Cause!
None of this is stuff I really feel like interjecting into the conversation. So I'm just left looking at that last bit of Hanisch's piece going, "Back in, what, 1970, someone said, 'Look, women are leaving this movement, and we have to figure out why so we figure out what our responsibility for that is', and still nobody's bloody asking."
Though now that I go to look at the thread, I see someone has made the 'look, this word is actively poisoned for some people' point, and someone else has put forth the 'stop assigning other people identity traits' point.
The first of those people reads here sometimes, and if she's doing so now, I wave in appreciation.
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"Yet another message board thread decrying the phenomenon, talking about how horrible it is, saying things like, "Well, the word means this, if you think this then the word applies to you" without recognising that the word is more an identity trait than a descriptive adjective."
YES. Yesyesyes. I still call myself a feminist when using it as relevant shorthand for people to understand at least part of where I'm coming from, but I'm so over the mainstream-white-middle-class-feminist clique whining about "if we only had more women who used OUR label to describe themselves..."
If feminism does its job properly, at some point it will not be necessary. On my optimistic days I think that is happening already...
Now, if you're saying the job still isn't DONE, and is still necessary, but young women do not want to identify, that is something else again..
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