To explain my commitment to being a proponent of feminism in the face of a number of objections, I need to offer a distinction I make between feminism and what I refer to as “feminist culture”.
Feminism can be tricky to define, but it refers to a bundle of political and intellectual approaches to understanding and objecting to injustices faced by women. Feminism is an outlook, a toolkit, a history.
Feminist culture is the range of things that feminists do.
When people complain about "feminism", very often they are objecting to a particular thing that some feminists have done. They are criticizing feminist culture, not feminism itself.
I can respectfully disagree with a range of different responses to feminist culture, including criticisms harsher than I would make. So when one objects to, say, the unmeasured rhetoric of "Tumblr feminism", one may be criticizing a part feminist culture without rejecting feminism.
That is not to say that everyone who "rejects feminism" is really just making fair critiques of feminist culture. There are a great many people who really do reject feminism. They may say that women face no inequities, which is factually untrue. They may say that the inequities women experience are just, which is morally wrong.
With that distinction made, I can be clear about why I insist that I am a feminist. I am not a "feminist sort-of". I am not a "feminist but". I am a feminist, period. I may have my criticisms of feminist culture, but I support feminism itself 100%.
I say that despite my position as a cis man, which I recognize disqualifies me as a feminist in some eyes. I say that despite social justice objections to parts of the feminist tradition that have failed lesbians, women of color, trans women, sex workers, and others. And I say that despite disagreement with some ideas from the feminist tradition. (Feminism has offered so many ideas that of course a few of them are dumb.) And naturally I have my own criticisms of feminist culture.
But to let those deterrents prevent me from calling myself a feminist would not just be mistaken, it would be dishonest. I have a deep commitment to the feminist outlook: women face terrible injustices, and they can and must be corrected. I employ the feminist toolkit: I grew up reading feminist theory and I apply its intellectual toolkit to everything, as I think any responsible citizen should. I am heir to the history of feminism: the person I am and the way I see the world owe an incalculable debt to the work of over a century of feminist thinkers and activists. Feminism is integral to how I see the world, to how I try to operate in the world. I cannot not call myself a feminist.
Originally posted at: http://miniver.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/why-i-insist-that-i-am-feminist.html