When Feminism betrays itself

I've had these words rolling around my brain for a little while now:  feminism has utterly betrayed itself.  This statement from Randa Abdel-Fattah at a recent panel on Feminism in the time of Gaza really cut through. 

It brought on a wave of reflection. A kind of reckoning with myself. 

In today's episode, we explore what happens when a movement with equality at its heart, fails to live up to its own ideology. And more specifically, what that means for those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists. 

This isn't just about the 'feminist movement'. It's about me, a feminist, taking an honest look at myself, my beliefs and my actions.

I share what I'm unlearning, where I've found my own blind spots, and invite you to join me in grappling with some (possibly uncomfortable) questions for yourself.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome. So lovely to have you here. My name is Annie. I am standing at a standing desk today 'cause I hurt my back a couple of days ago and while I don't think it's anything too major, it'll sort itself out soon. I am grateful to have a desk that can go up and down, and I have been going up and down, giving myself a bit of a chance to stand up and feel a little bit more ease in my back as it settles itself down and sorts itself out.

But as I am here at my standing desk, I am looking out on a pretty drizzly day, but a beautiful place as always, on Wurundjeri Country, and I want to pay my deep respect to elders past and present the custodians of this beautiful land that I get to live and work on.

 Today, I want to share something with you that I have been thinking about for a couple of weeks after attending a panel discussion on feminism in the time of Gaza a couple of weeks ago. It was a really great panel and lots to process, lots to think about, but there was one thing in particular that one of the panelists said on that night that has really stayed with me, and yeah, I've just found myself just mulling over it more and more. And so I want to share with you what I've been thinking and some of the reflection that I'm doing, and invite you if it feels relevant, appropriate for you to join me in some of that reflection as well. So the thing that really stayed with me was something that the amazing Randa Abdel-Fattah said, and it struck me so hard. 

She said feminism has utterly betrayed itself. Now. She was talking about the way that White or Western feminism has failed to uphold its own values of justice and equality, and especially in the way that it turns a blind eye to the suffering of black and brown women around the world, including in Gaza. And that in itself is not a new concept.

bell hooks talked about that. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who introduced the term intersectional feminism and others have illuminated the way that white feminism has failed marginalised groups, and that has been there right from kind of the get go. Going back to the suffragette movement where there was this fight for women's right to vote.

It's evident that all the way back then that feminism what we now might term white feminism has consistently been about the advancement of some, while others have been deemed to be an acceptable sacrifice. And so in Australia, women won the right to vote and that was built into the first Federal Electoral Act in 1902.

But did you know that in that very same act, aboriginal people's right to vote, which had previously been in place in some states, was removed. So at the same time as women were given the right to vote, Aboriginal people, men and women included, had that same right taken away because prior to that, aboriginal women, including women in South Australia, had the right to vote.

So from all the way back then, feminism has served some and betrayed others, which is really confronting in itself. And that's something that I have been grappling with for a few years now, and what is my feminism, how to make sense of feminism in the light of that history and ongoing practice that does the same thing.

But this was the first time that I've heard it like this, that feminism has not only betrayed certain people or certain groups, but feminism has betrayed itself. That phrase has stayed with me, that feminism has utterly betrayed itself. It disturbed me because the thing is that feminism can't betray itself all on its own.

Feminism has no life outside of the humans that consider ourselves to be feminists. So those of us who act in the name of feminism, it's people like me. Maybe it's people like you. The idea that my feminism has ignored, failed, or betrayed some others is confronting. And like I said, that's something that I have been reckoning with for a while now.

But the idea that it has betrayed its itself points to like a fracture internally within myself, that dissonance that occurs when our actions don't match our beliefs. My ideology, my beliefs, my worldview has betrayed itself, or I have somehow betrayed it. Then yeah, something's really out of place there, and so it's been playing over and over in my mind and really challenging me for the last couple of weeks.

I want to share with you a story from when I was a kid. I don't even know how old I would was in primary school, but what I do remember is that I was lying in our lounge room. Under the table, which was my preferred place for lying to watch tv. And it was a Sunday back in the day where there was that show.

It was called like the Sunday Matinee, or the Sunday movie, Sunday matinee movie, something like that. Some of you all know, I'm sure. But basically it was like where on Sunday they played a movie on the tv. And gosh, those were good old days where it was just so simple. You didn't have to choose a movie.

It was just, there was a one Sunday movie and if you're going to watch a movie, that's the one that you're going to watch. Anyway, so I was watching the selected by someone else movie and this movie presented a world in which women were rulers. So women ruled the world and the men in this movie were their slaves.

And I remember just being so captivated by this idea of this topsy-turvy world and looking at that, and I was like, whoa, imagine that women ruled the world. And I was like, oh, you know, there was something appealing about it, but also there was something in me, it was like, but that's not really fair for someone to rule over someone else just because we are women, we shouldn't get to rule.

And it was at that moment in the middle of kind of all of that processing, watching this movie that I was like, hang on. That kind of is what the world is like, but the other way round. And it was the first time that I can remember seeing patriarchy in our world and seeing that actually something is off here, and apart from which way that the gender roles were flipped and who was ruling who was, winning in this society.

Even looking at it with that flipped version where women were ruling, there was something about it that just seemed off to me and I think sometimes due to our experience or our conditioning, we don't really see what's going on and then something or someone helps us to see what we were previously blind to.

And as a kid, that movie did that for me. It was like, oh, hang on, there's something not right in our world, because men do seem to rule the world and that's not fair. That was my kind of, uh, as a child having a little bit of an eye-opening. And then in some ways being at this event and listening to this panel of women speaking and hearing that statement that feminism has utterly betrayed itself.

It was almost like another version of just kind of like, whoa, I hadn't seen it that way. And it kind of woke me up. I am going to take a guess that if you listen to this podcast, you probably consider yourself a feminist. And I'm going to also take a guess that you are someone who's open to some self-inquiry and some critical thinking.

And so in this episode, I want to ask you some of the questions that I am grappling with myself. I have not landed with answers yet, and in some ways that's the point. That's the ongoing work. I actually think part of the problem is that for some of us white Western women, those of us living with a fair amount of privilege, we actually grant ourselves the luxury of believing or pretending that we have landed, that the work has been done, that feminism has achieved its agenda, and where we're at is good enough, and so we can just drop the ball on that. So yeah, we might have the odd battle to fight every now and then. You know, a few small things like the gender pay gap or the rate of femicide in this country, underrepresentation of women in government perhaps, or leadership in general. But you know, overall, we're doing okay. But the question is actually, are we doing okay? I teach a session in our yoga teacher training about feminism and yoga and where they meet each other, and at the end of this session that I teach, there's a slide that I show and it asks the question, are we moving forwards or backwards?

So in terms of equality for women, are we moving forwards or backwards? And even just a few years ago, that really felt to me like it was a question for real consideration. And as a group, we would have discussion, well, we've advanced in these ways, but then there are other indicators that we are really not progressing or we might even be going backwards. And so we'd talk it out. But I've got to the point now where when I show that slide, it's actually not even a question, at this point, it's so clear to me that we are going backwards. If I zoom out from my tiny little slice of the world where maybe within my area, the question might still be a little bit gray.

Oh yeah. You know, we're doing okay in some areas, not so well in others. But if I zoom out and look at the big picture of where we are in the world, like we're rolling back, the rights, like abortion rights in the US apart from the fact that the leader of the US is a confirmed sexual predator. 

Women in Afghanistan are being treated as subhuman and basically erased from social life. I can't see any other conclusion, but that we are regressing with this. What do you think? So I have lots of questions and I want to throw some at you. I'm going to boil it down to just a few. The first one I want to ask is, where does your feminism begin and end?

Not just your professed idea of feminism, but what you truly believe and really care about. Where does your feminism begin and end. And I should say, I reckon this would be really worth journaling on these few questions that I'm asking in this podcast episode would be really worth spending some time considering and interrogating your own responses.

That's what I've been doing for myself and I'm continuing to do. So, where does your feminism begin and end? What's it about for you? Is it about rights? Is it about equality? Is it about freedom? Women's sovereignty over our bodies? Is it about girl power? Yes, Queen. Is it about opportunities for women? Is it about safety?

What is feminism about for you? Way back in the suffrage movement, it was really, really clear. It was like if you were a feminist, it was primarily about getting that vote. And then through the different waves of feminism, what feminism has been fighting for, what the agenda, what's been on the agenda has expanded and multiplied, and we're at a point now where we can have really, really diverse expressions of what feminism is, but let's not just get kinda lost in the diversity, but instead really take a moment to consider, well, for me, what is feminism about? And then whatever your answers are to that, who does it include? So I want to ask myself, is it just about me and people who are like me? Is it for people that I don't relate to?

Or is it also for people that I don't agree with? Does it apply for people that I don't personally know? And a caution on this one because this is an area that we have as a movement or movements repeatedly kind of screwed up. White feminism or white feminist have variously excluded, black and brown women, indigenous women, gay women, transgender women, Muslim women, Jewish women, poor women.

So, maybe a more helpful way of looking at it is asking the question of whom has my feminism not included, and am I okay with that? To me, ideologically I'm not okay with it, but when I look at the way that I can turn a blind eye to inequality and outright oppression of women in different settings and places and circumstance, it makes me wonder, maybe I am okay with it. Like, if I can just let that continue, does that mean that actually though I say that it matters though, I say that I care, maybe do I not? You might like to do this, write a statement of the vision of your feminism. Like if the goal of your feminism was fully realised, what would it look like?

Like what would you like to see? If we could say that we were genuinely living in a post-feminist world where feminist agenda had been thoroughly met. I mean, there's so many aspects of that for me, but one part of that picture that I'll hone in on just to share with you is women being safe. This is one that I feel in my own life, I feel it when I don't feel comfortable to go running in the dark, or I don't feel safe running alone in isolated places, like out in a forest or in National Park or something like that.

So that's something that is personal to me and important to me because it's personal to me. But where does it begin and end? Is it just with my experience or does it matter to me in a way that is beyond just my own personal experience? Because if it's just about me, then that's not necessarily feminism. That's just me wanting to look after myself and me wanting to be okay. So I'm asking myself, do I care about this beyond my own experience? What about women who are different to me? Is the vision that I have of women being safe still applicable? Is it applicable for other women? What about women who are not safe in places that aren't an issue for me?

So I feel safe in my home, but there are women who don't feel safe in home. Is that something that I care about as part of my feminism? What about women who aren't safe walking down the street even in the daytime, or women who are not safe in the workplace, or women who are not safe around the police?

What about women who just aren't safe? Full Stop. Those who are being targeted or kidnapped. Or arrested or bombed. Exterminated. Slaughtered. Does my feminism extend to them?

So once you have your picture of what your feminist vision is, then the next question you could ask is, are we there yet? So if you've got this idea, if feminism did everything that it could possibly do, and brought us into a space where feminism was no longer required. Are we there yet? Of course we're not. Maybe in some areas that matter to you, maybe we are there. But I would encourage you to perhaps insert the question or the word into that question rather than just, are we there yet? Are we all there yet? Like I think back to white women celebrating in 1902 the achievement of the right to vote.

While on that same day, aboriginal women and men were explicitly excluded from the same right? So if you'd asked a white woman at that time, how is feminism going? She may have said, we've done everything that we came here to do. We are there, we've achieved it. And meanwhile, aboriginal women and men were feeling the absolute brunt of that achievement.

They were feeling the opposite of that achievement, thoroughly excluded. And so there could be some areas in your feminist vision that are pretty well realised in your own life, in your own experience, maybe you have managed to break that glass ceiling and you are the CEO wherever you are. So now you are really experiencing just how far we've come, but how's it going for other women?

When we look at it like that, I don't think we could possibly say, yes, we are there. In fact, we still have such a long way to go.

So you've cast your vision of what a feminist, a post-feminist world would look like. What feminism means to you considered are we there yet? And then that leads on to the final question I'm going to ask. It's, is this my responsibility? And if so, what am I doing or what am I going to do about it? Is this my responsibility?

And if so, what am I doing? Or what am I going to do about it? And this one is a biggie. This one is really telling because if this is not my responsibility, then whose is it? And if it's not my responsibility, then I really don't think that I can call myself a feminist because a feminist surely is someone who is actively pursuing and advocating for feminist goals.

It's not just someone who believes women are equal to men, is it? Or maybe that's the issue. Maybe we've got really comfortable with just believing something without actually having to put action to those beliefs. But the question is, do you see it as your responsibility, and if you do, then what does that look like?

Is it about donating to causes that advance your feminist vision? Is it about speaking up amplifying voices of other women, particularly women who have been marginalised more than you? Is it about challenging harmful narratives within your own circles? And maybe one way of looking at this is to consider, is it cushy and comfortable for you to be a feminist the way that you are?

Is there any place in your life as a feminist where it feels a bit risky, a bit costly to be a feminist? What does it look like to be a feminist there and I notice when I am pondering these questions for myself, I observe in myself this reaction that comes up. And it's something I've seen a lot around me as well.

This reaction that says, well, I can't fight every fight. Like, why should I advocate for women in Afghanistan when there are also women being oppressed in Sudan and in Saudi Arabia, and literally being slaughtered in Gaza? Like where does it end? And then the bigness of all of that can lead to paralysis.

This not doing anything, which in practice is like accepting that this is good enough, accepting that I am not going to do anything by not doing anything. I am effectively saying I accept things like this. This is good enough for me. I've had conversations like this say relating to Gaza, and this isn't even specifically about women or about feminism, but what is feminism if it's not about equality, and what is a genocide if it's not about inequality?

So, some might ask a question, you know, why is Gaza getting so much attention? What about Sudan? What about the Congo? And when people say things like this, I want to ask, well, what are you doing about Sudan or the Congo? But often we just throw those things out there almost as a justification for our inaction.

It's not like, oh look, I'm so busy doing all this great work for people in Sudan or the Congo fighting those fights that I just don't have it in me. I don't have the time, I don't have the bandwidth to also support people in Gaza. That's not what I'm seeing. When people say things like this, it's really just a way of us justifying not doing anything.

So as a feminist, I am coming to terms with the fact that I may not be able to fix everything, of course, but not to let that be a reason for doing nothing at all. Can you pick something, someone to use your privilege, your voice, your resources for? It makes me think of Lilla Watson's reminder that our liberation is bound up with each other's.

Or as Audre Lorde said, I'm not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. I'm coming face to face with the question around that. Do I really believe that or actually is there a part of me? And truth be told, there obviously has been a part of me that says, while I'm doing okay.

I can accept that perhaps other women are not. And when I say that out loud, that's really, really not okay. So this is what I've been thinking over and, um, reckoning with over these last couple of weeks. And I think for me, a kind of working conclusion is this. It's acceptance that my feminist vision will not be fully realised in my lifetime. If I think about us being in a state of post feminism because there's no more need for feminism.

I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

My working conclusion also includes a commitment to doing something rather than nothing. Or to face the reality that I may call myself a feminist, but I'm not in fact a feminist. So if I say I am a feminist and yet I do nothing, then I'm actually not a feminist. And it's not just about the label of feminist, like who cares about that?

But it's more about what that represents internally, that actually my actions don't match my beliefs. There's something fractured within me and that is an okay by me. So it also includes for me, a commitment to ensuring that my feminist activity is not just for me and people like me. It can't just be about the people that I relate to most easily.

Doesn't mean it can't be about people, it can't be about me and it fighting for, like advocating for myself where I need to do that and advocating for people like me. Yes, it can include that, but I am realising that for things to change and for us to move away, and for me to move away from a point where you could accurately say that my feminism betrays itself, it has to be about people who are different than me.

I'm also landing with this that I may not be able to fight every feminist battle across the globe in my lifetime, but I will fight some and not just the ones that serve my own interests. So I'm committing to catching myself when I hear myself saying, oh, but there's so many more issues. And using that as a reason to do nothing about any of them, that I will catch myself and say, yes, there's way more that I can possibly do, but I'm going to do something for someone to stand alongside someone as a feminist. And I want to stay wary of being too cushy as a feminist. So noticing if it's easy and comfy to be a feminist in the way that I am, almost like that's like a warning sign that my feminism might need some reexamination.

So lots of questions there, lots of things to consider. How's it all sitting with you? I wonder. I hope that it's sparking some self-reflection and some interrogation of your own beliefs and the way that you show up or not. As a feminist, my intention is definitely not to lead you into shame or abandoning feminism.

But ultimately, I'd love to think that this could help you as I think it's helping me to step into a more congruent and courageous, and collective way of living.

I am still reflecting on all of this for myself and I would love, love, love to connect with you about it. So please find me on Instagram and let me know what you are thinking. Together we can find our way forward with this, we can keep working through how we keep showing up together, how we keep doing better.

It's that old thing. Beautiful Maya Angelou, that when we know better, we do better. Let's keep doing that together, hey. All right. Thanks for being with me as I have outwardly processed some of the stuff that's been going on and around and around in my mind lately. I hope it sparked something useful for you.

All right, sending you loads of love. I'll chat to you soon. Bye.