The other day, I overheard a few well-educated and cultured peers of mine talking about contemporary feminist movements. One individual brought up the movement for allowing American girls to wear tank tops in school without administrative consequences. Before she could even finish her thought, a group of her friends shut her down, outraged that their supposedly feminist friend thought that school uniforms were even important when there were bigger issues. How dare she bring up such a “basic,” “ethnocentric” and “irrelevant” issue when there are poverty-stricken women in Bangladesh fighting to get basic rights for themselves and their daughters? Or how about the issue of 12-year-old girls in Iran being killed when they said they didn’t want to marry a 60-year-old landowner? These were the global issues that mattered in the grand scale of problems, not our domestic, petty fight for bare shoulders. Call me crazy, but I think that this mentality of ranking gender-based issues is problematic for many reasons.
I’m incredibly proud to be a part of my generation. I think that we’ve adopted an attitude that promotes global awareness and empathy. This generation, for the most part, knows what’s going on, and, again, for the most part, we genuinely care. We want to make substantive differences, and we’re passionate about changing things for the better. I’d like to think that this attitude stems from a whole host of reasons, such as frustration with the “negative” legacy of the baby boomers.
In addition to using frustration as a mechanism for change, this generation has the ability to be globally aware through technology, which we’re incredibly proficient at. Most visibly, I think we feel kind of guilty. Since we are aware of all the horrors that are happening in every corner of the world, and because of social media, I think there’s this inherent connection we feel to people we’ve never met or places we’ve never been to as well as a desire to engage in global social activism.
I think there’s this underlying theme that my generation has going on — we try to overcompensate for the West’s historic ethnocentrism by giving more importance and attention to global issues. More frankly, we’ve started to notice and care about what is now called “the global south,” or what was previously known as “the third world.” Or, if you’re talking to someone who’s super ignorant, then “any place that doesn’t speak English,” as I was once told.
And so we have this generation-wide burst of guilt when we give precedence to domestic social issues. And in an attempt to rectify this seemingly selfish thought process, we focus on what’s plaguing Ghana, or Nicaragua, or Syria. But even though we like to think that by minimizing the consequences and gravity of our domestic issues and instead giving our attention to these global issues we are being better global citizens, it’s actually a harmful perspective.
When we diminish the importance of recognizing the monitoring and sexualizing of what an American middle- school girl gets to wear in class, we set ourselves back. As a South Asian-American woman, I’m never going to say that we should not give our attention to issues that women are facing in South Asia. As a transnational feminist, I will never be heard saying that in order for the women of South Asia to gain equal access to opportunities, it is necessary to minimize and invalidate the experiences of American girls and women vice versa.
Here is my argument: When we turn feminism into a game of “who has it worse?” we aren’t helping anyone; rather we’re doing just what hegemonic patriarchal society wants us to do — keeping ourselves busy fighting one another so that no real change is made for women’s empowerment. When we bring each other down, we fall back into that vicious cycle that keeps us all down and prevents us from accomplishing the true goals of feminism, which is to acquire total equality between all people, of all races, genders, ages, etc.
When you think about it, every issue is connected. When you tell a girl what she can and cannot wear, you’re inherently telling her that she doesn’t have control over her body, what goes on it and how she can and cannot present herself. You’re telling her that she is always going to be seen as a distraction to boys if her shorts are shorter than the middle of her thighs. Or if her shoulders are exposed, it will most obviously lead to the failure of the boys in her class. And clothing control and lack of bodily autonomy is just one of the ways that we tell women that 1) they cannot have full control over themselves and their bodies and 2) their desires and wishes will always be put second to the pursuits and potential of men.
Now for the same girl, but this time, her skin is brown, she lives in India and her family is forcing her to get married at the age of eight so that they can save money by giving her away to a much older man. They will then use that money to send her brother to school. If you think about it, the same issues are at play in this scenario as in the previous example.
When you sell a girl so that you can save money, you tell her that she is not a priority and that her worth is defined by a few rupees that will be spent to send her brother to school. Education is such a powerful tool for progression, but if you must wash your hands of your daughters and girls in order to educate her brothers and husbands, that’s not the way to a better or freer life. You’re telling this girl that she was pushed out of the picture so a man could be given an opportunity to succeed — that she wasn’t worthy enough to be considered for this opportunity. And now, by marrying her off, most likely without her consent, or by guilt-tripping her and forcibly coercing her, you’ve instilled this idea into her head that she cannot control what happens to her. Then, after getting married, it’s almost guaranteed that she will be forced to have sex with her much older husband and give birth to his child, all at an incredibly young age and most likely when she is not ready, physically or mentally, to do all of this. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve taught her that her body is not her property and thats what happens to it is not up to her discretion.
This was just a quick example of two seemingly completely different circumstances and how, when you really go through and take a close look at what’s actually going on, you can see that it’s all connected. There are thousands of other anecdotes that I could have used and I could have effectively argued that those are also connected and problematic. It’s so important to understand, respect and recognize intersectionality but also understand that feminism is not only for the “oppressed third world woman.” Seeing intersectional feminism in such a derogatory light is hypocritical and regressive of the progress that was made in the transition between second and third wave feminism with the help of groundbreaking feminist scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
Intersectionality tells us that feminism is relevant to every person in this world, regardless of background or culture, especially given our fragmented and divisive society. Because we are all connected, a method of oppressing one woman is a method of oppressing all women. We must recognize that the implication of oppression affects the lives of some women more intensely and dangerously than the lives of other, more privileged women. However, this does not mean that feminism is a competition, where attention and action is prescribed to my plight but not yours because you have never faced blatant sexism.
Women — all women — are subject to and have been victims of every sort of discrimination imaginable, and it is up to all of us (including men) to stand together in solidarity with one another to creative substantive, proactive and lasting change. This is why when you hear someone try to argue that they don’t need feminism, but the women of x,y or z country do, it is up to you to correct them.
Feminism is not a competition.
Vrinda Trivedi, a contributing writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at VTrivedi18@wooster.edu.