Feminism

For my intersectionality essay, I’d like to do a close reading of a couple episodes of The L Word, in order to look at how the character of Bette grapples with her many, complicated identities—and, in turn, how the media represents intersectional characters. Bette is a very proud and vocal lesbian, as well as a biracial (often white-passing), upper-class, able-bodied individual. The relationship between these identities really come into play when she and her partner, Tina (who is white), decide to have a child. The couple argue over whether or not it makes sense to use an African-American donor, if Tina is carrying the child (Bette argues that it is, because that way, the baby would look like both of them).

(I apologize for the lateness of this post, I thought I sent it in last night but I apparently did not)

As I read The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze, I realized how little I knew about veiling and veiling fashions. Many of my ideas about veiling were based off of uninformed, inexperienced Western dialogue about what it means to be a woman wearing a veil. After thinking about this more and having a conversation with Nkechi, I am now beginning to think that I have no place making judgements about wearing a veil or not, because I genuinely do not know what it's like and I grew up in a place where I rarely, if ever, encountered women who wore veils. Does it matter how I view these women? In a society that I have absolutely no place or authority in? It feels wrong to theorize and judge something I know so little about, whether positively or negatively.

Reading bridgetmartha's post sparked a desire in me to return to Nnaemeka's section on western feminism compared to nego-feminism. Re-reading this section highlighted for me some of my own presumptions, which came from approaching her work with a western feminist eye. Nnaemeka quotes a theorist (Steady 1987) who writes, "Neither sex is totally complete in itself. Each has and needs a complement, despite the possession of unique features of its own." This phrasing of "incompleteness" made me assume that Nnaemeka and Steady were assuming heterosexual relationships and the need for a man and woman to be partnered together. This is something I felt resistance to immediately. After reading through this section several more times, however, I caught myself.

I wanted to share some recent thoughts I had about the Mutter that fit into the same argument about how the place can be improved. I was especially taken by the developing fetuses they had (at 1 mo., 3 mo., etc.) and by the ones of disabled fetuses. Along with the entire museum, these portraits of disability and growth could really bring a normalizing eye to these phenomenon. We don't talk enough about our bodies in American culture (unless to shame women for not fitting some arbitrary ideal) but we have so many physical differences.

"I argue for going beyond the historicization of the intersection that limits us to questions of origins, genealogy, and provenance to focus more on the history of now, the moment of action that captures both being and becoming, both ontology and evolution" (361).

One of the things that resonated with me most strongly in Nnameka's article is her call for a more truly "globalized" view of feminism. While the word "globalization" carries connotations of imperialism in Feminist Studies discourse, I would argue in this case that it is instead could be reused and repurposed to describe the need for many different, culturally-inspired ways of talking about feminism. I find her call inspiring--ways of talking about feminism that are not western-culture specific, and instead incorporate the multiplicity of cultures available. It is using the identities of writers, of specifics, towards understanding the universal--much like standpoint theory. (See, for example, p.

In reading Nnaemeka's piece, I kept on going back to Persepolis and Americanah and thinking about the contradictions between the lives of the protaganists and Western expectations of feminism. Nnaemaka criticizes the treatment of "third-world" women as "case-study and country-specific sections" that pertain "to the specific countries from whence they come" but can't be used in theorizing, and it'd  be easy to fall into the trap of placing these works in such a catagory (366). Even though they only represent the narratives of single individuals (although Americanah is fiction, I still think the narrative it represents is valid in this consideration because of its realism), we should read them not as case studies but as pieces of a larger narrative.

Nego-feminism, and non-western feminism in general, reminds me so much of the way that gender is performed in different culture. Because gender is a performance, it is important to remember that acts that may be considered anti-feminist in America or other western cultures can still be feminist. Like the ability for some women to stay home with their children while their husband works may affirm their gender. Or black women to be able to relax their hair or have a weave could be considered an affirmation of gender. Many peoplel see it as anti feminist, and think that all women should go natural to reclaim their bodies. A part of the reason why I went natural was to be able to say I loved my body just the was it is, and I don'y need to mold it to western or white ideals.