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Thinking now about our discussion about the word "feminism" and "essence" of feminism and coming up against being categorized as a "man-hater," I can't help but think, "So what?"

Someone might think that I'm a "man-hater," but so what? That won't keep me from living my life as a feminist, and "valuing the devalued" as a professor of mine said so eloquently last night at a Women in Action meeting at Haverford.  If someone says that to me, and doesn't respect me enough to listen to my personal definition and listen to the fact that there are so many different levels to "feminisms," then I don't need to be spending my time with them anymore.

Why should feminists try to change the word "feminism", why alter it, for those who don't identify as feminists, and that probably never will identify as feminists? Why try to create an "essence" so that we can be easily identifiable?

Shouldn't a "goal" for feminism be to remain ambiguous, to be flexible, or as the Quakers say, be subject to "continuing revelation?" Feminism is something different for everyone, and even individual definitions will change over time. Why try to narrow it down? Isn't the beauty of feminism that it subverts the idea of a rigidly (traditionally male) academic definition process?

Thoughts?

And what do we really think about the gen & sex  program in the bi-co? Are we creating just another cell? I'm curious to hear what other people think; I personally don't think we are. I like that fact that the two classes I'm taking this semester for the gen&sex concentration (Quaker Social Witness @ HC, and Critical Feminist Studies @ BMC) have both been almost seeping into one another.  I feel like they have been feeding into each other all semester for me, and it's really freakin' cool!

QSW is about social justice: creating a definition, discerning our own definition, identifying our own issues of concern, learning about Quakerism's historic and contemporary issues of social concern, etc. 

I feel like our class has a similar theme. We are trying to "discern" our own definition of feminism (if one is a feminist... or not?), identifying our own areas of concern within feminism (our papers were about all kinds of neat-o things), and learning about feminism's attention to specific issues historically (1st, 2nd wave) and contemporarily ("3rd wave").

The gen&sex program is superbly interdisciplinary. There are classes from nearly every department that will fit into the requirements, and the requirements themselves are relatively flexible. That feels really progressive to me; it feels like  it isn't limited to a really specific curriculum or subject matter, so I don't think that it's re-creating "the law" -- in the same channels of the traditional patriarchal structure for academia.

Are there other gen&sex people in the class or people that know about it/have an opinion about it? I'm really just curious to see what other people think.