Every time that I read some text or work about history my most visceral response is this doesn’t make sense. The things that I am reading about, usually some ideological system implemented for the purpose of oppression (sexism, racism, queerphobia, etc) strikes me as being utterly illogical, irrational and unnecessary. Maybe I’m just too lazy and uncreative that I can’t fathom investing time and energy into making up ideas and forcing people to believe that just because. I say all this because that was my reaction when reading Becky Thompson’s work on Multirracial Feminism. She writes there is a widely held belief that “women of color feminists emerged in reaction to (and therefore later than) white feminism (338). This belief she attributes to hegemonic feminism telling a specific, narrow story about feminism. My response was there is enough evidence to effortlessly debunk this myth of a white, middle class feminist origin. Furthermore, common sense tells me that white people can’t do anything independently (I mean slavery) so why would I believe that white women could pioneer any liberation movement? Just makes no sense.
I have to constantly remind myself that people choose to not think practically. Hegemony functions within a collectively agreed upon state of impracticality. If you claim to want to free all women why wouldn’t you include all women? If you know that different feminisms coexisted why would you deliberately ignore those histories? I feel these are very basic questions. Most time I need to take breaks from reading discourse of any theoretical or historical nature because at the very foundation of it all is nonsense.
This text motivates me to learn more about feminisms of other cultures and time periods. I feel like there is so much about the social issues and activism of non black and non white women and non US women! Does that mean I am influenced by hegemonic feminism?
A key point I found in the text is that not only must the personal be political, but the political must also be personal (347). In the age of “I am (insert identities)” it’s easy to focus on what impacts you as an individual. However, freedom isn’t an individual state of being. Everyone must be free for freedom to be. Therefore, it’s necessary to think about another’s suffering and to ride for their causes as well. It’s just what makes sense.