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anorton's picture

Destroying "feminism"

When I entered this course, I had only studied second-wave feminism during college.  So, I was only knew feminism as an intensely women-centered philosophy/political stance.  When we were studying transgender and intersex, I placed those under a feminist heading mainly because I felt that, by virtue of being included in a feminist studies course, they had to be part of feminism.  I think that the time has come to, as Virginia Woolf advocated in Three Guineas, destroy the word "feminism."  As western feminists, we take it to mean so much, to include so many groups, that when someone wants to talk about specifically women-centered feminism, we have to shed possible meanings of the word.  This could possibly contribute to the idea that feminists who only include women in their understanding of the word are somehow less advanced or developed than third-wave western feminists.  This creates an unfortunate hierarchy in the ways of thinking about feminism that would be eliminated if we had new words to talk about all the different kinds of feminism.

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