Rethinking Feminism

Rethinking Feminism

Feminism was born out of a need for women to speak to systematic inequality based on their sex. Joan Wallach Scott writes, "My motive was and is one I share with other feminists and it is avowedly political: to point out and change inequities between women and men." Inherent in these inequities between women and men is the fact that women are on the losing end of a man/woman power dynamic. There is feminism and not masculinism because gender inequity is typically biased towards men. The majority of the world is either male or female biologically and this difference is acknowledged in some way by probably every culture. As such, according to Scott, "gender offers both a good way of thinking about history, about the ways in which hierarchies of difference- inclusions and exclusions- have been constituted, and of theorizing (feminist) politics" (11). What I want to explore is how one addresses these inequities without becoming defined by them.

Any assumption of sisterhood, of a universality of women, requires a prioritizing of that aspect of identity over all others. Helene Cixous writes of a "universal woman subject" and continues to speak about what "we" as women are and do throughout the rest of the article. She says she isn't implying that there is a "typical woman", but in talking about what "we" do, she does imply a set of behaviors that "we" should supposedly be able to relate to. This is most obvious in the passage where she writes about women speaking in public. Cixous doesn't specify who is speaking or what group she is speaking in front of; she just describes the woman. "She doesn't Ð''speak', she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies . . . she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body" (251). This passage illustrates the problem with speaking of "we" in such general terms. On one hand she is addressing something that may be true in many instances. At the same time I had an instant break with her reading this, since I don't see myself or many women I know like this. The same happened when she said, "women need to write women". This assumes the importance of that part of ones identity over all other the other parts and its authority to speak for all women. It seems better to say women should write themselves, then, if other women identify with that writing, fine. By taking a relatively culturally, or historical specific instance and trying to apply it to "women", Cixous's article elicited a response opposite of a sense of universal sisterhood.

In Under Western Eyes, Chandra Talpade Mohanty talks about some of these problems