Defining Feminism
Content Warning:
Mention of Sexual Violence
Image: Women’s March of Washington 2017, Unsplash
In 2018 my friends in the student movement asked me to marshal at the annual International Woman’s Day (IWD) March in Toronto. Despite being active in different social justice projects on campus and off, I felt hesitant to participate in this rally. When I walked into the auditorium where the organizers and participants gathered before heading off, I immediately regretted being there. Why? Pink pussy hats.
I rolled my eyes, sat down and waited for the organizers to begin. Several Black, Indigenous and racialized activists took the stage and emphasized the importance of intersectionality in our movement spaces. One of the organizers even addressed trans exclusionary feminism/feminists (TERFs) by pointing to the pink pussy hats in the crowd and subsequently asked people to take their hats off. Unsurprisingly, the white women sitting right in front of me refused to take theirs off. I sat in my discomfort but went on to marshal for the event. I walked the entire way alongside an Indigenous women-led drumming circle. Although the occasional pussy hat caught my eye during the March, I appreciated the main organizers’ commitment to centring an intersectional lens.
However, the word “feminist” remains a label I have trouble claiming. I remember calling my friend afterwards and speaking to her about concerns around the women’s movement. We talked about how much work there was still left to do to shift the discourse around what a feminist movement should look like and the morals it should embody. I keep going back to the 2018 IWD March because it was the first March after the #MeToo movement had taken off. Again, white feminists took up space in the conversation, notably actress Alyssa Milano, rendering it a conversation that ultimately lacked nuance used as political fodder. Constantly rallying around specific incidents of sexual violence and abuse, often always and only when the survivors were white, revealed what many POC, especially Black and Indigenous folks, have been saying all along: White women are not invested in undoing systems of oppression.
Pussy hats (and the occasional white women who drew pussies on the side of the road in chalk) were just the tip of the ice-berg. Marred in carceral logic and tactics, white women-led the conversation around sexual violence into a place that reinforced punishment as justice for survivors. Rooted in colonial thought and practice, the mainstream women’s movement and what is widely understood as “feminism” excluded women of colour, queer and trans women. Additionally, the movement successfully solidified the false notion that representation politics was justice, pushing a narrative that seeing women (usually cis-gender women) take up positions of power meant oppression no longer existed. This notion had always been a central goal of the mainstream women’s movement. Let’s not forget Trudeau’s “because it’s 2015” explanation for why his cabinet was 50 percent women. More importantly, let’s not forget Trudeau’s treatment of Indigenous and Black women in his caucus. And most recently, following an exhaustingly long US election, my Twitter timeline filled with outpouring support for and joy around Senator Kamala Harris, the first Black and Tamil woman to be elected the VP of the United States of America. Don’t even get me started on the “Girl Boss” discourse. Without the activism and scholarship of Black feminist scholars, I wouldn’t be able to have wrapped my head around issues of representation and, further, even make sense of the violence of carceral logic in feminist spaces. The work of Angela Davis, bell hooks, adrienne Marie brown, Mariame Kaba and many others helped me understand not to settle anything less than the complete dismantling of power structures.
“Constantly rallying around specific incidents of sexual violence and abuse, often always and only when the survivors were white, revealed what many POC, especially Black and Indigenous folks, have been saying all along: White women are not invested in undoing systems of oppression. ”
As an Eelam Tamil woman, liberation for me stretched past the politics of representation. My first understanding of confronting state violence and systems of oppression came from the Tamil women I knew and the stories I heard growing up. At the 2018 IWD March, the collective Thamilachi Power, an Eelam Tamil women-led group, had also attended the March for the first time. Despite not being able to walk with them that day, a couple of my friends participated in the rally with them. It was powerful to see the women I grew up learning about were the ones on Tamiliachi Power’s protest signs. Rooted in the commitment to community care work through their focus on childcare at the rally to the centring of Eelam Tamil women’s narratives who resisted Sri Lankan state violence, the collective, albeit small in number, was monumental in adding to the discussion around feminist organizing within the Tamil community. Organizers of that collective continue to be influential voices in various social justice spaces today. Their contribution helped me and many others come to terms with our understanding that feminist discourse can and should be reframed within the context of solidarity and collective liberation.
“As an Eelam Tamil woman, liberation for me stretched past the politics of representation. My first understanding of confronting state violence and systems of oppression came from the Tamil women I knew and the stories I heard growing up. ”
It wasn’t until recently when I read a definition of feminism that I could relate to. Harsha Walia, a Vancouver-based organizer and co-founder of No One is Illegal, shared this definition in her interview with the Feminist Wire in 2014:
“To me, feminism is not only about issues affecting women or those outside the gender identity- in terms of violence against women or reproductive justice—but also about completely shifting out paradigms of what justice and equality means and how we embody it – in particular our relationship to community care and the gendered division of labour that sustains it. For me feminist’s most transformative potential lies in the valuing of relational work, in care work like child care, elder care and emotional labour, in lifting up ancestral knowledge of grandmothers and land stewardship and how we manifest our responsibilities and accountabilities to each other, and in nurturing our communities and families through interdependency and resiliency. So dismantling patriarchy to me is much about breaking down a systems that privileges male and cisgendered supremacy as it is about breaking down a societal paradigm on competition, domination, commodification, expendability, and isolation.”
Walia’s eloquently puts into words all of my fragmented thoughts around feminist organizing over the last several years. Freelance Journalist and activist Nora Loreto included this definition in her latest book, Take Back the Fight, in which she provides an overview of the women’s rights organizing in Canada, addresses the issues within the movement (hint: lack of intersectionality), and offers strategies to strengthen the call for justice. An excerpt from Loreto’s book where she addresses “feminist governments,” and the watering down of the movement by politicians can be accessed here.
If there is one thing that I take away from all of the important organizers I’ve mentioned in this article and learned from over the years it is this: adopting an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial lens is fundamental to building a strong feminist movement. Without an intersectional lens, we will always run the risk of co-option and minimization of our collective struggle for justice.
