Finding Feminism

“When did feminism become a word that not only spoke to you, but spoke you, spoke of your existence? When did the sound of the word feminism become your sound?” (Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 4)

I recently had the pleasure of reading several feminist texts, among them Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. She poses these framing questions in her introduction. What follows is her own personal account of her journey into the messy political and social movements gathered under the term feminism. As I read, it occurred to me that, as I spend time rooting down during this season of my life, I, too, must consider the ways that being a girl, and now woman, have impacted my worldview. This year, I want to take time unearthing how my early experiences shaped me and my feminism, as well as how much feminist unlearning I’ve had to do as a result. Think of it as an exercise in extracting those toxic elements that no longer serve me. 

I’ve written before about what it was like to grow up in a patriarchal household, one shaped by diverse cultural currents. As I remarked a year ago, my childhood taught me that to be a “good girl” you had to be silent, obedient, docile; that you should make your small self smaller still; that you should never question male authority or your elders. I also learned that the world would rather sacrifice the bodies of women rather than hold the men who hurt them accountable. These lessons were reinforced by the world around me. As Allison Yarrow has written in her book 90s Bitch, when the media discovered that Monica Lewinsky, then a mere 22 years old, had sex with the most powerful man in the world, it was she who was mocked, humiliated, pilloried by the media, men and women alike. Though the media seemed to have learned its lesson 20 odd years later, Christine Blasey Ford’s attempts to hold Brett Kavanaugh responsible ultimately fell on deaf ears, too. The takeaway? Women’s efforts to thwart male supremacy are ultimately futile. Men may do as they please and we better get used to it.

For those of us with histories of intrusion onto our bodies, experiences with sexual violence at the hands of men quite distinctively shape our early feminist worldviews. Early in her book, Ahmed recalls an episode of being groped by a man on a bicycle as he rode by. “We all have different biographies of violence,” she observes, continuing, “The violence does things. You begin to expect it. You learn to inhabit your body differently through this expectation.” She concludes, “You are learning, too, to accept that potential for violence as imminent, and to manage yourself as a way of managing the consequences” (24). She calls this process “girling,” as in, “because you are a girl, we can do this to you” (26). Or, as Jia Tolentino put it in her essay “Pure Heroines,” young women learn in adolescence that womanhood will be both “a definitive thrill and sorrow” because of “the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life” (107).

As I read these lines, I felt so horribly seen. The world teaches us all different lessons, but this was an early childhood lesson I learned. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I began to sense that there was something wrong, something inherently unjust about this arrangement. My arrival at this conclusion was, however, easily written off by those around me as teenage angst, a sixteen-year old’s rebellion, disruptive of the status quo and thus dangerous, wrong. It wasn’t until I went to college that I was able to surround myself with a community of like-minded young women who similarly perceived these gender iniquities and consciously sought to think differently, to live differently.

In those early days, my feminism was deeply rooted in an apprehension if not outright fear and loathing of all men. I was always oriented towards escape. I still keenly remember being in a dining hall in grad school when the entire football team walked in for lunch between practices. The space suddenly overwhelmed with maleness, I ate as quickly as possible and as close to the door as I could be, in case they gave me any reason to run. Even now, if I find myself in a dark garage, I think of about a hundred ways to fight off an aggressor. This is not because I watch too much Law and Order SVU. This is because there have been several times in my life that I have had to physically confront men who would access my body without permission. These fears are, in other words, not rooted in a fantasy of female vulnerability and male aggression; rather, they are an all-too real reflection of my lived experiences.

Because of my fear of men, I initially had trouble accepting the movement to embrace trans people in my version of feminism. I was, at the time, what they call a TERF – a trans-exclusive radical feminist. This isn’t to say that I participated in active discrimination against trans folks – at least not that I’m aware of. But it is owning that I couldn’t grasp the concept very well as a result of being a cisgender woman. My self-preservation instinct at that time relied on being able to clearly distinguish between women and men, between the good guys and the bad guys, you might say. Suddenly, this blunt instrument that I had developed to keep me safe was considered prejudice, ignorance, bias. Eventually, I had to confront and explode my limited understanding of both sex and gender. It was uncomfortable, frightening even to surrender a core element of how I understood the world. But it was necessary to live in right community with those around me. This is just one way that I came to see how my feminism fell short, had the potential to dehumanize those around me. But there would be other revelations to come.

** 

As Ahmed and Tolentino suggested, sexual violence and the overall sexualization of our bodies defines what it means to move from girlhood to adolescence. We all develop different strategies in the face of this thing we cannot control. For the most part, I, like so many women, opted into the only power that society freely gives us at a young age – the cultivation of beauty. Beauty seems like it can protect us. It can give us a certain degree of power over men. Wielded skillfully, it might even keep us safe from them. It doesn’t always work, though. A system that only values you because of your beauty can also devour you. Beauty makes you stand out. It attracts attention. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, “It is dangerous to be discovered.” Discovery and visibility are an invitation to be accessed inappropriately, non-consensually. “How do we mourn and survive the violence of being known?” Gumbs asks (16). We have to develop other skills to protect ourselves, I would answer.

In high school, I channeled my budding feminist consciousness into a sort of up-and-out philosophy, thinking that if I could make it far enough in life, then no man could ever dismiss, diminish, or otherwise degrade me ever again. I was aided in this theory by my immigrant upbringing, the philosophy that taught me hard work could accomplish anything. I became hooked on the opiate of meritocracy. I believed in bootstrapping your way into the American Dream. In college and graduate school, these ideas were magnified by an academic culture that preaches the sky’s the limit, you determine your own success. I lived like this for most of college and some of grad school until I started to see how the forces of exclusion I was experiencing at Princeton were part of a larger system of inequities that very negatively affected my students in far worse ways. My feminism shifted, assuming a new shape. It became more expansive, taking on larger structures of power, what we might call woman of color feminism, or Third World feminism, or simply womanism, as Alice Walker has termed it.

As I became increasingly involved in DEI administration, I ran up against feminisms that didn’t quite align with my own. For example, I began to see that many of my female colleagues often perceived their work with students through the lens of saviorism. In other words, they didn’t see themselves as being in community with our students; rather, they sought to help students in order to imagine themselves as heroic liberators. Considering how much I identified with my students (for better and for worse), this did not appeal. Indeed, it felt condescending. As I came to learn in my own research on female do-gooders in “the West,” this power dynamic has often been a part of wealthy and middle-class white women’s engagement with the “less fortunate” – that is, racial others and the impoverished. And I found myself confronted with my next major choice as a feminist: was this the tradition to which I, a white-adjacent South Asian woman and first-generation immigrant, belonged? More importantly, did I want to subscribe to it?

I can’t lie: there was much to recommend this kind of feminism. In the era of the #Girlboss, which Jia Tolentino describes so incisively in her essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” I believed that "becoming successful was a feminist project" (175). I was not alone, of course. Many millennial women succumbed to this shallow feminism because we had been “bombarded for many years with spurious, embarrassing, and limitlessly seductive sales pitches that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours” (177). It was characterized by “a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction” (178). It was also a form of “market friendly feminism,” encouraging us to buy products emblazoned with nonsense “feminist” slogans and adorned with sparkly unicorns (179). “The problem,” Tolentino sharply observes, “is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective” (179).

“Where we find feminism matters, “from whom we find feminism matters” (Ahmed, 5, emphasis mine). 

Girlbosses were my supervisors, my mentors, my role models. Their feminism was my feminism. I aspired to be like them. I, too, wanted to accumulate titles, win a handsome salary, bask in the sunshine of prestige. In short, after so many years of feeling belittled, humiliated, and victimized, I wanted power. Better than beauty, which fades, power offered the ultimate protection. I indulged in what I now consider to be a shabby, shallow kind of feminism that was narrowly focused on professional success and individual-achievement-as-liberation. I didn’t partake of saviorism, I don’t think. But I did leverage other women’s penchant for it in support of my students. And it usually worked. 

It would take me years before I would come to understand how paltry inclusion as a goal was – for my students, as I’ve previously written, but also for me. As Jessa Crespin writes in Why I Am Not A Feminist:  “Unfortunately, many will think the only thing wrong with the system – and by ‘system’ I mean this whole complicated world that we inadequately convey with words like ‘patriarchy’ or ‘capitalism’ – is that it is not allowing them entry.” She then points out, “The whole thing is rigged to include some and exclude others, to benefit some and exploit others,” concluding, “By fighting for your own way to inclusion, you are not improving the system, you are simply joining the ranks of those included and benefiting. You are doing your own excluding and exploiting. In other words: you, a woman, are also the patriarchy.” (61-62)  In the end, to be included in the ranks of power required more moral sacrifices than I was able to abide. Rather, I saw that, in the quest for power, most of us tend to simply reproduce the system that once oppressed us, engage in the abuses to which we ourselves were once subjected.

That was a hard pill to swallow. And since encountering Crespin’s impactful words, I’ve grasped for new feminist traditions. A couple years ago, I was still in the middle of that journey, examining the paltry mentorship styles that I had thus far been exposed to. At the time I concluded that while I rejected patriarchy whole-heartedly, patriarchy with a softer side was really not much better, either. Only very recently, indeed in the last few years – was I introduced to a new kind of feminism with a wildly different history and radically different aims. Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, Martha Jones’s Vanguard, and Stacey Abram’s Our Time Is Now showed me the path to a type of feminism – Black feminism – that has had a very different origin and trajectory, very different ways of politicking and organizing, very different aims and objectives. For me, the intellectual tradition of Black feminism offers a different way of being in community with others and for others in this world.

I am not, of course, Black. But I deeply respect and admire the Black feminist tradition. It speaks to me, to who I have become. It has helped me see that, due to early life experiences, I ascribed to a type of feminism that was quite narrow. It was binary and trans-exclusive. It was shallow and unrooted. It was individualistic and self-focused. And I only saw it as my inheritance because, though a woman of color, I am a white-adjacent South Asian-American who has attended and worked in predominantly white institutions all my life. TERF feminism, white feminism, girlboss feminism – these are traditions I’ve had to unlearn over the last five years. Reminding myself of where I come from, who my ancestors are, and what I owe them has helped reorient me of late. Like them, I see now that I won’t be happy unless I work towards justice and liberation for all. It requires humility. It requires persistence. As Mariame Kaba has said, it requires hope. Not hope as a feeling, not hope as optimism, but hope as a discipline, a practice. And I’m up for the challenge.