Blog the Second

It's really funny that we read McIntosh's Unpacking this week, since it is something that I've discussed many times in online discussions of privilege. The thing that always frustrates me about the piece is that it seems so obvious to me to take what she says about race and apply it to other aspects of your life, like class, gender, and sexuality, but inevitably (it seems to me) the people who would benefit most from that kind of examination are the people least likely to actually do so. In the third chapter of The F-Word Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about how this generation is the most accepting of queer (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and other non-conforming people in my parlance, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered in hers) people and issues, and while I know intellectually that that is true everywhere, from where I sit here in Oklahoma it very often doesn't feel that way at all.

It feels like we are still trying for the same level of acceptance here that they hit in the 80's in, say, San Francisco, and that's really frustrating. The oddest part about that for me was that my friend Amadi, who I've often talked about these issues with, very much identifies herself as a third wave feminist, as well as a woman of color and a fellow cripple, someone with health problems that significantly affect her ability to function normally in society. When we talk it isn't as a young woman gaining counsel from an older, wiser mentor, but rather as friends and fellow-fighters in an incredibly inhospitable world. She grew up the daughter of Christian missionaries and eventually converted to Orthodox Judaism to marry her husband, but I have very few friends I would say are as strongly feminist as she is.

And part of that is, I think, because she was forced by her position in life, on the axes of class, race, and sexuality, to confront the iniquities of modern American culture. As a woman of color who graduated from Columbia Law she did not have the luxury of not questioning her social status, and as a bisexual woman who willingly joined a deeply traditional faith and bore five children of her own she could not avoid dissecting the influences that led her to make those decisions, because they weren't the easy, obvious ones to make. And it's important to me, and to frame my friendship with her, to note that the third wave is just as important to her as it is to me, and that we see it in much the same way: the meeting place of the gay rights movement (important to both of us on deeply personal levels), the feminist movement, the struggles of women of color to find agency in an overwhelmingly white society, and the ongoing and ever-pressing class inequalities in this country.

I don't think third wave feminism will die until all women are free to do and be what they want. Be it have absolute control over their reproductive freedoms without fear of repraisal, film a sexual activity for the joy of doing it whether they're getting paid or not, make a lifelong commitment to the partner that they choose that is recognized and supported by the government and the church of their choice, or not even be a woman at all, but rather cast off the archaic bounds of the genders "man" and "woman", "boy" and "girl". Until that happens, the third wave is going to keep lapping at the shores of the status quo. (And how deliciously wrong does that sound?)