What is feminism anyway?

Feminism in my youth was this notion that women should be equal to men. What’s hidden in there is the idea that women are biologically determined to be smarter than men and should take over the world in the place of men. What’s not stated, and therefore missing, is race (ethnicity and culture), place (land, urban/rural, geography), and spirituality. It’s an unfortunately accurate reflection of what was missing from my awareness during the time.

Many Black and Native American women have not aligned with the word feminism because it never aligned with them. Audre Lorde introduced the word, Womanist and Womanism as she reflected on Sojourner Truth's famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman too?” declaring that a movement for the equal rights of women must include all women, not just white women. The shift from second wave to third wave feminism began as the world started listening to Kimberlé Crenshaw who brought the language of intersectionality. She called us to think about more than isolated theories of race, class or gender and encouraged us t0 complexify rather than essentialize and universalize the experiences of Western (white) feminists as the experience of all women around the world. She added experiences of being able-bodied, of place, and of queerness to the discourse on feminism. Fourth wave is calling upon feminists to include queer theory, gender and sexuality, further expanding the feminist movement to include anyone who internally identifies with femininity, to whatever degree, and then chooses to share their feminine expression in a way that is socially understood by today’s standards of femaleness.

As I push my own ideas of what it means to be a feminist, I’m calling into question a deeper understanding of sex and the ontological understanding of gender as a patriarchal notion. The word mother for example, is traditionally owned by women. Why is that? In Yoruba culture, Ife Amadiume taught us that wife is a role not attached to gender because the Yoruba didn’t structure their categories with gender. Instead, they structured hierarchy and organization by kinship. So why can’t a wife be male and a husband be female? And why do we need limitations in our categorization of gender such that we would prevent ourselves from expanding the epistemological and ontological story of who gets to be wife and who gets to be husband or who gets to be mother and who gets to be father?

Patriarchy has offered categories which subjugate anything that is not white and male, to be below white and male. It suggests time as a linear trajectory which translates into the egotistical notion of modernity. Many neo-liberal archeologists, psychologists, sociologists and historians use the framework of modernity to prove that patriarchy is better simply because it came after matriarchy. Patriarchy’s dualistic paradigm offers man as human and rational, relegating woman to a sub-category existing somewhere in the dark unconscious and the mythical. This narrative serves to create man as tangible, rational and concrete while women are relegated to the folk tale, the imagination and the archetype. Built into this paradigm is the belief that in order to concretize what is feminine, it must take a masculine mind -- leaving man to the study of woman and woman to the field of being studied.

Struggling to unwind myself from the framework of dualism, as a feminist, I have found myself wound up in patriarchal epistemologies leading to a definition of feminism as patriarchy’s opposite. Unaware that I am re-constituting and reifying the same framework of patriarchy, I march on destroying the fabric of the feminist movement right as I build it.

In my western liberal upbringing, I was rightfully wary of the religious voices that sought to control my body and my sexuality. By not participating in those religious institutions, I felt empowered. However in the wake of my absence from religion, as an empowered secular, urban, middle-class, lesbian, feminist, I lost the opportunity to find my own spirituality. Looking back I now realize I left it for the religious institutions to define and ultimately colonize. In a world of dualistic thinking, by allowing religion to own spirituality, I chose no spirituality. But I am spiritual. And I am a feminist. In an effort to understand what spirituality means to me I sought out Western feminist theologians. I found that many of them are just as flawed and are also struggling to uproot their own colonized framework. Once again, I found myself steeped in more of the same problem deeply intertwined with colonized framework and methodologies.

So what if feminism is spirituality? Being feminine for me means being whole -- it means loving and being in relationship. The feminist movement has never been one that stops changing and shifting. It’s constantly getting it wrong and therefore constantly adapting with the hopes of getting it right. Feminism isn’t defined by patriarchy and therefore it is not simply a hierarchy of women over men. It also isn't about a liberal Western femininst ideology which believes in the innate flaws of man as physically aggressive and destructive because this belief serves to uphold the patriarchal thinking of biological determinism. Thinking all the way through, Western liberal feminists' notion of biological determinism, ultimately leads to the demise of all men.

In my definition, feminism exists where anyone simply is or feels feminine – as defined by themselves. Feminism has the possibility of decolonizing spirituality and the divine even though many Western feminists struggle with essentializing and universalizing who and what is or isn’t spiritual. I believe feminism has the capacity to heal because it has often been at the heart of social justice movements and has been the vehicle for social transformation. I believe feminism requires a deeper form of spirit and spiritual transformation in order to work. Alka Aurora, professor at CIIS speaks about an “integral feminist pedagogy” one where justice equates to healing and healing equates to justice. A classmate of mine said that simply talking about justice feels like the work of the colonist because as a black woman in her 60s she has never known justice. And while we dissect and contemplate our understanding of justice she’s still waiting for justice to occur.