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DEAR GOD YES. For the love of women, let this happen. More city council meetings, less “awareness raising.”
Latoya Peterson (from here)
I kind of agree with this and it’s mostly reflected in my personal priorities but…hmm. I do think it’s funny/silly that various blogging platforms are the only alternatives to “feminism” (whatever that is) listed in a piece that’s supposedly about branching out your activism. if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and all that.
anyway I guess my frame of reference here is academia. a couple of years ago the gender studies major was abolished at my uni under the guise of “gender mainstreaming” — i.e. they claimed that they weren’t gonna cut any gender-conscious subjects, that you would be able to study feminist and queer takes on whatever you were interested in. most subjects in the Arts faculty are cross-listed anyway, almost everything in Gender Studies would get you credit in another field. but what it meant in practice was that gender studies subjects had no home, no base. they were marginal everywhere. a lot of subjects got cut and a lot of academics have left. I see the same in activism — it’s a lot easier to push a strong feminist agenda on a not-specifically-feminist issue if there is strong specifically-feminist activism happening close by. you don’t have to do all the work of convincing people of first principles.
obvs academia and blogging and activism are all very different. but I think it’s important for every radical political take, every marginalised constituency, to have its own home. it would be great to have a feminist take on everything be a really mainstream thing. but I think that is what we call a “utopian post-feminist future”.
(Source: mikkipedia)
