Some More on Radical Feminism and bell hooks

Awhile back I had promised a post that would make an effort to define radical feminism. I like to think that I can define things, and neatly fit them into some kind of comprehensible box. I will usually set out to do this and my project goes awry just from the sheer fact that things aren’t so cut and dry, neat or easy to get to the bottom of.

The one thing I do know is that “radical” means to get to the root. I would say that in my short lived experience with radical feminism, it is very much about both the cultural and institutional ways that misogyny is maintained. Radical feminism is not about reforming the system we live in, it is about creating a new one altogether.

Am I a radical feminist? Still don’t know. I think so, but I’m not sure. At the very least, I ascribe to the above paragraph. But otherwise, the need to know is becoming less important in comparison to just familiarizing myself with various authors and theories. In Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks ties up her book with some of the reasons why feminism has failed. I think that what she has to say is really powerful. Though I’d been reading bits and pieces of things that addressed issues like this, reading this passage was really a light bulb moment for me. Specifically, that we are vying for power in a system that works by the very virtue of the fact that certain segments of society have little to no power.

Although the contemporary feminist movement was essentially motivated by the sincere desire of women to eliminate sexist oppression, it takes place within a framework of a larger, more powerful cultural system that encourages women and men to place the fulfillment of individual aspirations above their desire for collective change. Given this framework, it is not surprising that feminism has been undermined by the narcissism, greed, and individual opportunism of its leading exponents. A feminist ideology that mouths radical rhetoric about resistance and revolution while actively seeking to establish itself within the capitalist patriarchal system is essentially corrupt. While the contemporary feminist movement has successfully stimulated an awareness of the impact of sexist discrimination on the social status of women in the U.S., it has done little to eliminate sexist oppression. Teaching women how to defend themselves against male rapists is not the same as working to change society so that men will not rape. Establishing houses for battered women does not change the psyches of the men who batter them, nor does it change the culture that promotes and condones their brutality. Attacking heterosexuality does little to strengthen the self-concept of the masses of women who desire to be with men. Denouncing housework as menial labor does not restore to the woman houseworker the pride and dignity in her labor she is stripped of by patriarchal devaluation. Demanding an end to institutionalized sexism does not ensure an end to sexist oppression.

The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created and illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.

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Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks

This entry has been edited to death over the past few weeks, so I figure at this point I’m going to just post it and be damned.

I’ve been making an effort to broaden my reading in terms of feminism, and I’m trying to introduce a steady stream of works by women of color. I started with Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks. I feel like the book has planted a seed. Some of the things she wrote about have given me pause to stop and think, but it has been difficult to absorb it all. I think I’m going to have to go back and reread some parts to really do it justice.

I’m sad to say that because I didn’t jot things down during the moments of saying “that’s so incredible!!!” this review may be a little dry. I am having trouble remembering some of the specific things that really clicked for me, so this is basically just summarizing some of what she addresses. (And I’ve learned from my mistake as I’ve been jotting things down every time I read something amazing in my current book.)

The book discusses the the black “matriarch,” that black women are strong, domineering, and in control of their families. The idea is that this supposed position that they hold emasculates black men and makes the traditional nuclear family structure impossible in the black community. This seems to be a pretty common assertion in the media and I had embraced unquestioningly, having never stopped to think about the truth of the matter or just how racist and misogynist it is. hooks debunks the idea of the matriarch and demonstrates how white patriarchal concepts of masculinity are projected onto black men. At the same time, I was really kind of floored at the way perceptions can take root when you don’t have a clue. While rationally I can see what she is saying, I kept thinking but it’s true!!! I think she also did a great job of tying in how black women were treated and conceptualized during slavery and how those attitudes have persisted.

hooks also points out the drastic ways that black women’s experiences have differed from white women’s. For instance, while white feminists were working to liberate women and felt the key to this was integration into the workforce, they were neglecting the fact that black women had been working outside the home for decades. Through this, she illustrates that the feminist movement did not take women of color into account at all, but rather only built on and considered the experiences of white middle to upper class women.

She writes of the racism of the white suffragists and the misogyny of the male leaders of the civil rights movement. Reading some of those things was pretty cringe inducing. Not only did the suffragists express racist ideas, but also they actively kept women of color feminists from participating in the movement. Hell, I don’t remember if she speculated or if this was fact but the white suffragists didn’t want the vote for all women, they were just miffed that black men, former slaves got it before them (by law, anyway). And while they were reacting to the idea that their place in the hierarchy was upset, black men in the civil rights movement were trying to push black women into white patriarchy’s ideal of woman-hood in an effort to claim some semblance of power.

I really like the way she discusses language - that when scholars are talking of “women” and “blacks” they are typically talking about white women and black men. So when people like, say, Betty Friedan spoke of “women” in the Feminine Mystique she was speaking for all women when only white women were facing the problems she describes. This writes out women of color who did not have those experiences and allows us to ignore the issues they face. From what I gather, this has been one of the major failures of the feminist movement.

It seems to me that this is one of the more basic books on women of color and feminism, in that it makes a good entry point. Despite that, it does make things considerably more complex and I know that I’d probably benefit from both rereading it and reading related texts.

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