Not Feminist, eh?

There are many words I consider part of my identity, including feminist. It is a very loaded term. Since I was a young girl I knew that I was all for equal rights, but I shied away from being called a feminist, as many girls do, because of the stereotypes associated with the word. In this post I'm going to write about being called a feminist, denying you're a feminist, and introduce the website Not Feminist, eh?

Only in university did I embrace the term feminism (with its multiple and fluid definitions). In a Media and Feminist Studies course we started the semester with a whirlwind reading of Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media by Susan Douglas. The whole book is a great read and especially relevant to anyone who was a girl in Canada or the US anytime in the second half of the 20^th century.

Chapter 12, titled "I’m not a Feminist, but…", resonated with me because only a couple of years before reading this I was definitely making statements about equality that began with that expression. The chapter discusses why women in younger generations have tended to distance themselves from the term. Often, women don't understand its meaning or don't want to be labelled as a feminist because of the negative connotations and the stereotypes associated with feminism. In class we addressed media representations of feminism as everything from dangerous to dead, and the myths that feminism is no longer needed, either because of its failure or because of its success.

Post-feminist theories help us understand how feminism is perceived in the Global North. In her book Gender and the Media, Rosalind Gill writes:

I want to argue that postfeminism [sic] is best understood not as an epistemological perspective, nor as a historical shift, and not (simply) as a backlash, in which its meanings are pre-specified. Rather, postfeminism should be conceived of as a sensibility, and postfeminist media culture should be our critical object the phenomenon which analysts must inquire into and interrogate. This approach does not require a static notion of authentic feminism as a comparison point, but instead is informed by postmodernist and constructionist perspectives and seeks to examine what is distinctive about contemporary articulations of gender in the media (254-255)

Post-feminism should be conceived as a sensibility… Today’s media culture has a distinctive postfeminist sensibility organized around choice, empowerment, self-surveillance, and sexual difference, and articulated in an ironic and knowing register in which feminism is simultaneously taken for granted and repudiated (271).

In her article "Post-feminism and Popular Culture", Angela McRobbie writes:

Post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasize that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force (215).

A couple of weeks ago I came across the website www.notracistbut.com, a recent project that makes racism more visible and calls into question whether we live in a post-racial society. www.whitewhine.com, another site with a somewhat problematic name, but similar purpose, calls attention to so-called “first world problems” – essentially problems that aren’t serious and generally only afflict affluent people in the Global North.

I read about the source of Not Racist, But… content and discovered OpenBook. Curious, I typed “feminism,” “feminists,” and “not feminist but” into the search engine, and Not Feminist, eh? was born.

The website highlights status updates that use “I’m not a feminist, but” to express a feminist perspective while avoiding the feminist label. It also compiles statements that express negative sentiments towards feminism, blame feminists for  specific or general problems in the world, or perpetuate stereotypes about feminists.

 

Stereotypes about feminists are problematic because they erase the differences of a diverse group of women. Furthermore, it's problematic to view all of these stereotypes as negative – is being masculine, pro-choice, or not shaving your legs a bad thing? No, of course not. So let's just keep that in mind.

There is a joke about feminists changing light bulbs that apparently went viral recently. The punch line varies but mostly claims that feminists “can’t change anything.”

This "answer" intrigues me because it hints that feminism is indeed relevant and needed, but that there is resistance to equality and change, and therefore attempts to ridicule feminists for (and discourage them from) trying to change the status quo. Post-feminism, anyone?

Not Feminist, eh?