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I was mildly surprised when I first found out I was a feminist.
I had thought a feminist was an extremist. A woman with sleeves rolled up, bearing a waving flag and a very intimidating look of determination. She would have to be mowing down her opponents fleeing in front of her. She was impressive, excessive, and largely unnecessary in our modern world. This made her impressiveness and excess look ridiculous.
Then I saw the Vagina Monologues. And I was moved and blown away. It felt like a call to arms. In my burning passion for what I had seen, I didn’t realize anyone could feel differently. Of course this was stupid, because if people didn’t feel differently, what need could there be for feminists? And the more I went on and on about the show, the more I saw that my feelings were not universally shared.
So it tied together. In that moment I realized that not everyone felt as I did, and that the world needed feminists. And I also realized that “feminist” is a much broader term than what I had previously imagined.
Now, I believe any person valuing their own freedom is, whether or not they know it, a feminist. Because whether or not you are free, you cannot truly value something as high and beautiful as freedom without wanting it shared. Knowing its beauty, you want it spread as far and wide as possible.
There are those, whether or not they say so, who do not value their freedom. But they also do not want to be alone in the chains they embrace, so they drag others with them. They first oppress themselves and then oppress others.
I would like to think that some day there will be no feminists. There will be no movements for human rights, no political prisoners and no disappearing activists. One day I hope we will not have to be anything other than free.
A feminist is nothing more than a freedom lover. A freedomist.
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The suggestion that many don’t even know that they are feminists seems to imply that feminist values coincide with a greater number of socially acceptable beliefs than we realize. However, if that were true, feminism would no longer serve a purpose. Since feminism exists precisely to shake up socially accepted norms, the apparent social unacceptability of feminism is proof that it is needed.
Moreover, the underlying issues that feminism stands for shouldn’t take a back seat to redefining the label. If our primary goal is to show others that feminism isn’t what people think it is, then our purpose becomes purely self-referential. The real question we should be asking ourselves is not what a feminist looks like, but rather what a feminist stands for, or more broadly, what it means to a woman. The act of overcoming restrictive expectations of femininity is more important than the redefinition of the term ‘feminism.’
When I worked in the live-in component of a summer academic program for pre-teens one summer, I was reminded of how much taller twelve-year-old girls are than their male counterparts. It made me think of how different the reactions you evoke from people are as your height changes. Though my sister is three years younger than I, most people treated us as if we were twins because she spent much of her childhood near my height. I never received the deferential treatment I imagine most elder siblings do.
In response to a question in my math textbook, my second-grade teacher once determined that I was the shortest person in my class. As a consolation, she predicted that one day I would be even taller than her. She was correct, as I became one of the tallest students in my eighth-grade class. At the time, the other girls and I would make ourselves even taller with multi-inched platform shoes. For commencement and our formal graduation boat trip across Lake Michigan, we competed over the lengths of our heels.
As some eighth graders competed over height, others implicitly idealized their prepubescent petiteness. People often say that a girl can be tall, as long as she’s not too tall. In response to the Common App diversity question years later, one friend recalled being made to feel ‘oversized’ (she was not) in contrast with the daintiest, porcelain-doll-like little girls. I had not expected my friend to feel this way, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized people do associate physical smallness and consequent, so-called cuteness with femininity. I suppose such ideas should not surprise me, given the social pressure for women to be look younger, and the preference for neoteny in women.
Expectations of smallness are not that far removed from expectations that girls be skinny. When we first discovered e-mail addresses in middle school, the kids forwarded so many chain-letter surveys to each other. They would regularly fill out class superlatives—‘smartest,’ ‘most talkative,’ ‘skinniest.’ I remember never being considered the skinniest compared to those kids, which has made me feel taken aback every time someone in college has called me skinny. But I suppose body image is relative. It seems we’re always negotiating the relationship between our sizes and our reactions from others.
Perhaps I had especially short high school classmates, male and female, but I continued to tower over many a 5′ peer in my adolescence. I felt like a giant standing among them. By the time I reached college, however, I lost the height advantage. While I am still above the average height of a woman in the US (5′ 3.8″, according to About.com; I am 5′ 4.5″), even my little sister now considers me ‘little’ (today, she is 3.5″ taller than me).
The height difference between the average matriculating Penn freshman and the average graduating senior from my high school was enough that I hadn’t anticipated that other Penn students would call me small. I was unused to it because it was not how I positioned myself relative to others in high school. Being treated as a petite person made me feel as if others inferred some corresponding docility based on my size. It’s disconcerting when people in a new environment interpret your size differently from the self-construction you’ve developed in your original environment. Being thought of as diminutive as an adult is also socially belittling, as if you’re a child or cartoon character, instead of a respected, full-grown human being to be treated seriously as an equal (indeed, there are other, more serious cultural precedents for women being treated as permanent children). Hopefully, I don’t shrink too much when I get old.
I wrote a blog entry for Penn Asian Review about a talk given by Dr. Nancy Abelmann at Penn last month. The talk was entitled “Impossible Labor: The ‘Domestication’ of Early Study Abroad.” Dr. Abelmann is a professor of anthropology and women’s studies at University of Illinois. She has studied the role of Korean mothers in “early study abroad” (ESA)- that is, studying abroad before the college level, as has become pervasive among primary and secondary students in Korea.
Dr. Abelmann spoke about the pressure on Korean mothers to take their children abroad to study English, while the fathers stay in Korea to fund the family in America. Dr. Abelmann noted that Korea has historically had a higher rate of early study abroad than other countries. She attributed this phenomenon to Korea’s economic policies, which have embraced globalization to a greater degree than those of other countries. Furthermore, as the 1997 Asian Financial Crash created middle class anxiety about social reproduction, the greater demand for consumer education manifested in ESA’s appeal.
Dr. Abelmann has researched several published memoirs that give mothers instructions on how best to manage their children’s educations in America – the “impossible labor” in the title of her presentation refers to the unattainable standards these instructions set for mothers. As means of socially reproducing the role of the mother, these memoirs made explicit prescriptions for “normative demands of femininity.” While the mother inherits a familiar, straightforward role in managing the child’s education if she stays in Korea, she faces the challenge of navigating an unfamiliar education system once she goes to America. In these memoirs, mothers express anxiety about their children’s loss of Korean culture. Dr. Abelmann also noted the particular strain on transnational subjects who were in America temporarily and had no intent of immigrating here permanently.
While Dr. Abelmann focused on how this changed social expectations of mothers, she also noted that sometimes fathers ended up communicating with their children more often when their children were abroad. Because the fathers worked late hours, they did not see their children much to begin with when the children were still in the country. However, when the children studied abroad, the fathers had to take extra initiative to keep in contact with their children through Skype and other means.
Last Wednesday I followed Anne’s recommendation and attended a screening sponsored by the Penn East Asian Studies Department of a documentary called “Autumn Gem.” This film tells the story of China’s first female feminist, Qiu Jin (pronounced Choo Geen).
I tried to interview the filmmakers Rae Chang and Adam Tow after the screening; however, they were in a rush to get to dinner. So instead, I emailed them with some questions and they promptly responded!
How did you first discover the figure of Qiu Jin?
Rae: I first came across Qiu Jin in a book, Writing Women in Modern China, about ten years ago. It was an anthology that included English translations of her work, as well as a brief biographical sketch. What caught my attention was that she was described as a “radical feminist” from China, which came as a surprise to me because I didn’t even realize there WERE feminists in China, much less radical ones! That led to doing more research about her life, and after collecting more material I thought she’d make a great subject for a documentary.
What is most inspiring about Qiu Jin to you?
Rae: She was an extraordinary woman who was very much ahead of her time in demanding equality for women. While she certainly wasn’t the only women’s rights advocate at the time, she was inarguably the most prominent, as her martyrdom brought national attention to the early women’s movement.
As a student of foreign languages, I know that sometimes English translations do not give a completely accurate meaning of what the author communicates in their native language. Did you encounter any trouble with this as you translated Qiu Jin’s texts?
Most of the translations we used in the film were done by scholars, including Professors Amy Dooling and Lingzhen Wang, whom we interviewed. I unfortunately can’t read Chinese, so I did sometimes feel disconnected to the source material. Another aspect was that much of Qiu Jin’s writing is done in an archaic literary style, so even modern Chinese speakers would have difficulty understanding her poems.
You mentioned that people in China think of Qiu Jin as an admirable figure; however, China continues to face many issues with gender discrimination. Who are some notable modern-day Chinese women who are advocating for the women’s rights abuses of today?
Rae: Certainly, considering the current state of gender relations in China, Qiu Jin is still way ahead of her time, even now, over a hundred years later! I watched a documentary a while ago called “The Great Step Forward: China Women in the 20th Century” which includes interviews with current feminist activists, including women working in legal and social organizations in China.
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As you can see, Rae is very passionate about her work. Fortunately, her talent coincides with her passion. The composition of the documentary was phenomenal. The subtitles were very clear and well-timed, the image quality was fantastic and the use of various media (including reenactments, visits to historical sites, some great political cartoons and insightful interviews from academics) made the story come to life.
While I definitely applaud Rae and Adam for their great work on putting together the film, I must admit that I probably would have been enthralled by even an musty old encyclopedia article on the life of Qiu Jin. This woman grew up in the last two decades of the 19th Century, when China was in the midst of the Opium Wars. Thanks to the support of her family, she was permitted to sit in on the school lessons of her brothers, practiced martial arts with her cousin and read the works of female warriors like Hua Mulan (yes, she was not just a Disney invention…she actually existed).
Though Qiu obtained an education, she didn’t escape the painful practice of foot binding (read here for a great story about stories from women living with bound feet). The ultimate goal of foot binding was to make the feet 3 inches long with a pointy end, to acquire the look of a lotus flower.
As the documentary explained the tradition of footbinding, I could not help but compare the pointy bound feet with the pointy heels that women today still wear. When will we finally dispel the myth that “pain is beauty”?
I don’t want to tell you the whole story of Qiu Jin because I want to encourage you to see the documentary for yourself. If you’re in the California area, you can catch on of the remaining screenings. If you’re not in the California area, you can order a copy of the DVD here or wait for their next tour (to come in March 2010). Adam and Rae are also hoping to distribute this documentary to television. With Adam and Rae’s talent, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day this film shows up on the History Channel.
For more info, check out the Autumn Gem website.
Over the summer, I read this awesome book called A People’s History of Sports in the United States by Dave Zirin. Zirin does a marvelous job of contextualizing politically, socially, and economically the emergence of “sports” and “leisure activities” in our country from the late 19th century onward. In each historical period, he discusses contemporaneous women’s thought on sports and how it related to their position in society (that this is sectioned off into a separate segment seems weirdly polite, but that’s another discussion for another time). His painstaking research rewards us with such delightful trivia as a list from a 1878 American Christian Review article detailing what will happen should a women attempt to play croquet; it starts with “1. A social party,” and progresses through “5. Picnic, croquet and dance” and “8. Exclusion from the church,” concluding with “11. Shame and disgrace” and “12. Ruin.”
Zirin’s other commentaries on women’s sports are more substantial and fascinating, particularly his discussion of how women suffragists began to use athletic competition as a symbol of their movement. At the forefront of sporting activities favored by women is one for which I too have much adoration: bicycling. According to Zirin:
“In 1895, twenty-five years before women won the right to vote, suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “Many a woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle.
Susan B. Anthony agreed, saying, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”
Right on, suffragette biddies. It’s interesting to read, considering women have been somewhat slower to hop on bikes – because typically, our clothing is less agreeable to ride in, and who wants helmet hair, anyway? But I must protest that I saw many a woman in high heels and mini-skirts biking through Paris and Amsterdam last summer, and I reveled at seeing women so exceedingly feminine and powerfully independent.
So if you haven’t hopped on a bike yet, may I highly suggest that in the name of feminism, you do so.
I got an email about this event through a listserve and I thought it sounded interesting (I guess there is a gender-bending female soldier other than Mulan):
“Wednesday, October 28, 4-6PM, Annenberg 110 (3620 Walnut Street)
“AUTUMN GEM: A Documentary on China’s First Feminist
“AUTUMN GEM explores the extraordinary life of the Chinese revolutionary heroine Qiu Jin (1875-1907). An accomplished writer, women’s rights activist, and leader of a revolutionary army, Qiu Jin boldly challenged traditional gender roles and demanded equal rights and opportunities for women. Compared to a ‘Chinese Joan of Arc,’ she emerged as a national heroine who redefined what it meant to be a woman in early 20th-century China.
“Join us for a free screening and Q-and-A session with filmmakers RaeChang and Adam Tow.
“Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies
Co-sponsored by Asian Pacific American Heritage Week”
Qin Jin tried to overthrow the Qin Dynasty and was sentenced to death. She is famous in China for having been a martyr.
I first heard of Rachel Simmons through a profile in Time magazine.
We’ve all heard the stereotype that girls treat each other with greater underhanded cruelty than boys treat each other, à la Mean Girls. Instead of attributing such behavior to biological differences, Rachel Simmons makes the interesting argument that this actually results from girls facing greater social pressure to be nice than boys face. She seems to suggest that because the repressed hostilities need to have expression somewhere, they come out in the manipulative and catty behavior that we recognize.
She writes:
“the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone’s back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that’s not about girls themselves but about the culture that they’re growing up in.”
While we’ve all noticed that girls can partake in those rituals, I am not sure myself whether I would agree that it is culturally conditioned—or maybe I just never noticed it myself. In my elementary school (and for me, elementary school in Chicago is 1st-8th grade) girls did place indirect social pressure on each other to be nice. I heard my peers say, “Laura is the nicest girl in the class… Michelle is the second-nicest,” as if it were some competition. It did make it seem like niceness was something to aspire to.
On the other hand, I didn’t interpret it as something girls had to aspire to more than boys, but I guess the boys weren’t standing around trying to compare who was nicest (maybe because women are expected to be more nurturing?). I suppose teachers may have been complicit in the stereotype that girls are the nice, well-behaved ones, and there’s a greater expectation that boys will misbehave, but those descriptions never seemed prescriptive to me. I am personally wary of the suggestion that the social pressure pre-exists the stereotype, because I never felt that I had to try to be nice BECAUSE I was a girl. It just seemed like the basic human-being way to behave. Even if boys were thought of as the troublemakers in class, I didn’t feel as if teachers were more lenient towards them when they misbehaved; I didn’t sense a different standard for behavior between boys and girls. Then again, there are limitations in drawing conclusions from personal anecdotes.
Simmons’ generalization about Asian girls and families in the last paragraph also makes me uncomfortable, especially since I find it untrue of my extended family. Furthermore, Asia is such a large continent that such a sweeping generalization cannot accommodate either the subtle or pronounced cultural variations that occur (besides, when I think of Asia, I think of Uzbekistan). It is not clear to me why she thinks she has the authority to make the statement in the last paragraph either, since on her web site she doesn’t seem to have any specialization in Asia-related matters. Even if she had restricted her writing to a particular region of Asia, such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Asia Minor specifically, I think there is still considerable variation within those subregions. I have found that other journalism about psychological or social attributes about Asians also neglects to take into account noteworthy variations in Asian cultures.
However, I was still curious about her other writings, so I decided to look up her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. She writes about girls’ underhanded forms of aggression towards each other, the result of societal pressure to be “nice.” I don’t find the prose or the content especially engaging, but I thought these lines were interesting:
“Annie was so afraid of isolation that tolerating abuse seemed like her only option” (61).
“Annie tried to please her friend at any cost, wanting only to save the relationship. Her unremitting focus on staying friends with Samantha allowed abuse to take over the relationship” (61).
“With meanness so intermixed with the relationship, Annie lost the capacity to tell the difference” (61).
Simmons suggests that girls are under a lot of pressure to be nice, regardless of how they are treated. Is the relationship she describes above true of girls? If so, are girls afraid of isolation because it is intrinsically unpleasant, or because they feel social pressure not to be isolated? Is the stigma of isolation worse than the intrinsic negative effects? Which is the greater motivating factor that keeps girls in abusive friendships with each other?
Vivienne Maricevic, a photographic journalist of “erotica, sexuality and gender,” has photographed naked men since the late 1970’s. Beginning with “Male Burlesk,” which featured male exotic dancers, Maricevic went on to videotape “Live Sex Shows” at clubs around New York City. In 1986 she began to photograph transsexuals, transvestites and drag queens, documenting the transition from male to female.
From October 9-November 7, Maricevic will be exhibiting her art at the AxD Gallery. Her newest works center on the male nude and she captures “moments ranging from pensive introspection to displays of potent virility.” She shows the variations in man – the changes that men can personify.
Interestingly, however, she prescribes her website “For Women By a Woman,” subverting the norm: instead of the female body being revealed for men and art, the male form is being exhibited for us as women. Maricevic photographs these men in precarious positions, with entire exposure. The full exposure of the female has been documented by many artists including John Carroll Doyle, Jens Bruggemann, and Stefan May.
The title “Shooting Men” further points out this reversal: Maricevic literally takes shots of men for her artwork, but she is also “shooting” down the idea that men cannot be photographed as art. In terms of her earlier works with “Male Burlesk” and transvestites, she also shoots down traditional gender roles in art: as a female photographer, she exercises the agency that many female subjects are denied in work by male artists.
Originally, I was going to describe these men as “beautiful objects” instead of “beautiful beings.” I almost fell into the trap of seeing these men as objects for my own visual indulgence, which is what many people tend to do when seeing pictures of the female body. However, when I look at Maricevic’s photos of the naked men, I don’t think she is objectifying them, maybe because for me for something to be made into an object it has to be beautiful in and of itself, not simply because the person shooting the photograph has talent. Granted, the female body is beautiful, but rarely is the male form seen as such. Having Maricevic photograph naked men, of all shapes and sizes, causes me to view men in a different way. Maricevic’s way of photographing helps me to understand that beauty lies in everything and everyone. Although she reverses the gender roles, she doesn’t abuse her position as artist; she beautifies, but not necessarily objectifies her male subjects.
I have recently had the immense pleasure of reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, a sprawling (nearly epic) work serving as a loosely biographical piece. What does this 19th century white male poet have to do with feminism? Well, mon ami, just about everything. Whitman writes for the equality of gender and race, sexual freedom and homosexual liberation; he held modern feminist views in a time when most women were simply fighting for the right to vote.
Whitman espouses many popular transcendentalist ideas about the individual being one and many simultaneously. The speaker of the poem, the “I” should not be confused with the actual person of Whitman himself; rather, this persona is an expansive one, which bursts beyond the conventional margins of the self. Whitman opens his poem with “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Essentially, Whitman is aligning himself with all humans—men, women, black, white, etc. and they are all part of him and of each other. He invites all to his metaphoric table, “the kept-woman and sponger and thief are hereby invited… [the] slave is invited…the venerealee is invited, there shall be no difference between them and the rest.”
More than acknowledging the unity of all peoples, Whitman goes so far as to say, “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, and I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, and I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.” Ok… so this might seem problematic as it can be construed that Whitman is relegating women to the domestic sphere. First, of all this was the 1850s, so although Whitman clearly is ahead of his time, one cannot isolate him from a period in which women played a largely domestic role. Likewise, he asserts that being a woman is as great as being a man, so I don’t think Whitman necessarily wishes women to be trapped in the home; rather, I would argue that he is merely reminding his audience of the importance of women in general.
Yet, none of these previous sentiments are nearly as progressive as the blatant sexuality that flows through the entire piece. Whitman talks of hetero and homosexual pleasure, as well as the transcendental experience of intercourse. In a sense, human sexual contact allows one to transcend their earthly bonds and become a part of all things; again the idea of remaining an individual while being part of another person.
So now that the glories of Whitman’s forward, feminist thought have been modestly expounded, I strongly urge each and every one of you to take the time to read Song of Myself (or any of Whitman’s work, for that matter). The poem is long, and somewhat daunting, but trust me when I say you’ll be a changed person for the experience. So there you have it, Walt Whitman, the new (old?) face of feminism.
