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laleiaThis started out as the long rambly story on how fandom taught me feminist theory, and has instead devolved into "Why I am a Feminist" mashed up with "My Views on Feminism."
Feminism and Me
I was first exposed to feminism through media, which is to say that at 12 years old, I believed feminism was about girls being better than boys, and didn't think much of it. When I described it as such once, however, my other friend immediately corrected me: "It's when girls are equal to boys," she gently explained, and that was when I first really thought about feminism.
Now, the idea that girls are equal to boys, the idea that girls might need to fight to be equal to boys, this was actually nothing new to me. In 4th grade, I'd vowed to become President of the United States one day just because a 5th grade boy had told me girls couldn't be president. (I have since given up on this ambition after realizing what a pile of shit politics was, and also, how unsuitable it would be for introverted little me.) In 5th grade, I'd taken great pleasure out outperforming all (okay, all but one) of the boys at a local math competition, especially when they'd only recently told me, "Girls aren't good at math." Growing up, my parents repeatedly reinforced the idea that girls were equal to boys (a fact that I later look back on somewhat cynically and bitterly, and consider mere lip service, with a dash of trying to convince themselves as well as me that a daughter was just as good as a son), which combined with the types of role models I had, the books I read, the movies I watched, what I learned in school, meant I was completely unprepared for the about-face they revealed later in my life.
Which is to say, considering my home environment, growing up in a Chinese American household (which traditionally tends to be steeped in a culture of at least light misogyny), where I did, I have absolutely no idea how I turned into the radically feminist, antiracist, liberal person I am today. Not that I consider myself exceptionally feminist/racist/liberal, only that I am astonished I was allowed to form all of my political opinions and positions almost completely independently of my parents' input, and with what I would consider relatively low influences from my teachers. In other words, I have no idea what made me who I am today.
Regardless of how it happened, I was almost perpetually "Girl Power" for most of my life, so when I had the opportunity to attend a summer program after my sophomore year, and had the opportunity to choose a class as a "Major" and a class as a "Minor", I chose for my Minor "From Suffragettes to Riot Grrls: Profiles in Women's History."
Or, Feminism 101.
I'm not quite sure what I took away from that class, but it's really the most feminist theory I've ever learned, because I've never actually taken a formal gender studies class ever. I watched the videos about masculinity, about how women are portrayed in advertising, the ones that are considered classics in gender studies.I learned about why some women might want to be called "womyn", why "feminazi" is a terrible term (I'd actually never heard it before), and it was a fascinating class with a great group of girls (and one guy) that I loved.
But you see, a lot of this stuff was still very theoretical to me. Sure, I combated sexism in my everyday life in different ways, but some of the core principles of feminist theory I never quite got. I knew them in theory, but I didn't ever give them much thought.
This is where fandom comes in.
Feminist Theory and Fandom
Back in the day (and by back in the day, I really mean a few years ago), there were these anonmemes going around where people posted their opinions about fandoms and got into their arguments, and it was all anonymous and wanky and enormously hilarious for bystanders.
The fandom, by the way, is Naruto, which for those of you who don't know, is a shounen manga. Basically, it's a comic about ninjas.
Someone posted a major complaint about how Sakura (the main female character) was incredibly weak (physically), and complained about how Kishimoto (that's the creator of the series) always made his female characters weak, and how it was sexist.
And then someone else responded and tore apart the argument by questioning why physical strength was critical to determining a character's worth. Sakura was physically weaker than her male comrades, but she could do so much more. More importantly, she could heal people.
Essentially, this someone else questioned why society values the traits that are gendered masculine (beating people up) and completely devalues the traits that are gendered feminine (healing and emotion and the like).
I vastly oversimplify the argument to get the point across, but that was when I stopped and things really clicked for me. I thought, "This is feminist theory. This is the idea behind feminism, not just asking why males are valued over females, but why masculinity is prized over femininity."
You can learn about something, but when you experience it or you see it in experience, it has so much more oomph.
Since then, I've interned with the Feminist Majority Foundation and I've taken several semi-gender studies classes at my school (classes I took for other purposes but were cross-listed with the gender studies department). I know a lot about the issues, but ...
On Teaching Feminism
There are topics I like to pretentiously consider myself an expert on (the fantasy genre and manga/anime), and topics I should be experts on but am not (like politics and international relations).
And then there's racism and sexism, or antiracism and feminism.
I don't consider myself an expert on either topics, and I'm always learning more, but it turns out that there are actually an awful lot of people who know less so I find myself actually teaching it to them even though I do not consider myself qualified in the least. There is nothing more terrifying than discussing interracial dating with a group of feminists and then realizing that none of them know about the exoticization of Asian women in white male-Asian girl relationships and why Asian men tend to be emasculated in the media and in American society in general, and that the conversation you thought you were having about interracial dating trends was actually you lecturing them except you totally haven't covered everything you would need to because you didn't realize they didn't know anything. (Okay, so maybe there are things more terrifying than that, but it can be a huge shock to realize how much some people you thought were so educated actually don't know.)
[And also, random side note, I've only recently begun to take note of how rarely intersectionality takes place in the real life, and how conversations about Asian women "selling out" by dating white men and/or discussions about interracial marriages almost always assume that white men are only dating Asian women because they're exotic and not because they might have good personalities, and how discussions of these trends often completely overlooks the individuals people's agency (please see an earlier rant about the passive-aggressive Asian American man on Craigslist for my exact opinion), and also how mainstream feminism does tend to focus on issues that are rather exclusively white, and how many classic feminist movies only have white women in them)
Whenever I have to give a mini "Feminism 101" or "Antiracism 101" spiel, it always greatly unnerves me because I don't feel qualified to be in a teaching position in that conversation, and also because I try to avoid having these conversations whenever possible. I am a lurker by nature on the Internet, and introverted by nature in real life. If my friends have opposing views, unless I am very, very, very close to them and know that we have compatible political views, I won't argue with them, won't voice my opinions, won't bring things up. I hate justifying myself, and I hate when I lose respect for my friends in the process.
Final Note
Finally, a note on definitions.
I am a feminist, and I am proud to be a feminist, but I know that not necessarily a lot of women are. A lot of women I would consider feminist don't identify as feminist, and there tend to be two types of reasons for this. First, there are the people who say, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." These are the people who are scared to identify as feminist solely because of the media portrayal of feminists.
(Please note, I also hate when people respond to this by saying, "Not all feminists are man-hating lesbians who don't shave." Guess what? I don't shave, and I know people who are lesbian, and I'm sure some feminists hate men-as-a-socially-constructed gender even while having no problem with individual men. And when you say that, you're really saying, "Not shaving, or being lesbian, is socially unacceptable and I don't identify with those feminists. I think they're gross, too." Which, if you don't realize why that would be problematic, I would rather not have this conversation with you.)
Anyways, those people I tend to be very frustrated with, because, hello, Christians have no problems identifying as Christian even though there are very radical Christians out there who bomb abortion clinics and firmly believe gay people are going to hell and I don't know, practical polygamy. Christians don't think, "I'm not a Christian, but I believe in Christianity" just because there are radical Christians, so I'm not certain why women say, "I'm not a feminist but I believe in feminism" just because there are radical feminists out there.
Then, there are the people who have issues with the feminist movement, specifically the waves that tended to exclude women of color and focus exclusively on white women's issues, occasionally at the expense of women of color. These people I also tend to refer to the previous argument about Christianity, but I give their concerns a ton more legitimacy because dissociating with a movement because of political disagreements and/or the movement's history and/or the mainstream movements issues is, in my mind at least, completely different from dissociating with the movement because of social stigma.
One of the things I love about feminism, though, as with any movement, is that there are opposing positions. And different people believe different things.
Oh, I guess there is a third group of people, people who identify with feminist principles but aren't currently activists, or aren't actively involved in the movement, so they feel bad identifying as feminist because they aren't doing enough.
My point was going to be, I believe that personal definitions of others are important and that other people's self-definitions are also important. I define feminism as "proponent of equality between women and men" and if I think you fall under that, that's what I think of you as. I try to respect your personal definition, of course, because I can't just impose my definitions on everyone and people get to define themselves as well.
I'm rapidly losing steam here so I'm going to end this now, but with a postscript.
Postscript
I started out intending to describe why I link feminism to fandom, and I discussed that a little but not really that much, so I wanted to finish up with where I see feminism in fandom today.
I lurk in the progressive parts of fandom, and I think that helps, but I see feminism in fanfic.
Fandom, you see, can be pretty sexist. I've been meaning to write an essay on feminism in fandom for the longest time, and this is most certainly not it, but that'll probably come tomorrow if I'm still in this procrastinatory mood. I take heart, though, from fanfiction. Nothing cheers me more than the femgenficathon, and this year, there's also a matrithon. People recognize that female characters are vastly underutilized, and they flesh them out through fanfiction.
Fanfiction is when you can take the sexist implications of the source material (canon) and subvert it however you wish. I've always found fiction a commentary on human nature/society/reality/the world, and I find fanfiction a commentary on fiction.
Someone on the flist the other day discussed fanfiction as literary criticism, and that is where fanfiction rests in my heart: a form of feminist literary criticism.
Okay, I'm done.
Feminism and Me
I was first exposed to feminism through media, which is to say that at 12 years old, I believed feminism was about girls being better than boys, and didn't think much of it. When I described it as such once, however, my other friend immediately corrected me: "It's when girls are equal to boys," she gently explained, and that was when I first really thought about feminism.
Now, the idea that girls are equal to boys, the idea that girls might need to fight to be equal to boys, this was actually nothing new to me. In 4th grade, I'd vowed to become President of the United States one day just because a 5th grade boy had told me girls couldn't be president. (I have since given up on this ambition after realizing what a pile of shit politics was, and also, how unsuitable it would be for introverted little me.) In 5th grade, I'd taken great pleasure out outperforming all (okay, all but one) of the boys at a local math competition, especially when they'd only recently told me, "Girls aren't good at math." Growing up, my parents repeatedly reinforced the idea that girls were equal to boys (a fact that I later look back on somewhat cynically and bitterly, and consider mere lip service, with a dash of trying to convince themselves as well as me that a daughter was just as good as a son), which combined with the types of role models I had, the books I read, the movies I watched, what I learned in school, meant I was completely unprepared for the about-face they revealed later in my life.
Which is to say, considering my home environment, growing up in a Chinese American household (which traditionally tends to be steeped in a culture of at least light misogyny), where I did, I have absolutely no idea how I turned into the radically feminist, antiracist, liberal person I am today. Not that I consider myself exceptionally feminist/racist/liberal, only that I am astonished I was allowed to form all of my political opinions and positions almost completely independently of my parents' input, and with what I would consider relatively low influences from my teachers. In other words, I have no idea what made me who I am today.
Regardless of how it happened, I was almost perpetually "Girl Power" for most of my life, so when I had the opportunity to attend a summer program after my sophomore year, and had the opportunity to choose a class as a "Major" and a class as a "Minor", I chose for my Minor "From Suffragettes to Riot Grrls: Profiles in Women's History."
Or, Feminism 101.
I'm not quite sure what I took away from that class, but it's really the most feminist theory I've ever learned, because I've never actually taken a formal gender studies class ever. I watched the videos about masculinity, about how women are portrayed in advertising, the ones that are considered classics in gender studies.I learned about why some women might want to be called "womyn", why "feminazi" is a terrible term (I'd actually never heard it before), and it was a fascinating class with a great group of girls (and one guy) that I loved.
But you see, a lot of this stuff was still very theoretical to me. Sure, I combated sexism in my everyday life in different ways, but some of the core principles of feminist theory I never quite got. I knew them in theory, but I didn't ever give them much thought.
This is where fandom comes in.
Feminist Theory and Fandom
Back in the day (and by back in the day, I really mean a few years ago), there were these anonmemes going around where people posted their opinions about fandoms and got into their arguments, and it was all anonymous and wanky and enormously hilarious for bystanders.
The fandom, by the way, is Naruto, which for those of you who don't know, is a shounen manga. Basically, it's a comic about ninjas.
Someone posted a major complaint about how Sakura (the main female character) was incredibly weak (physically), and complained about how Kishimoto (that's the creator of the series) always made his female characters weak, and how it was sexist.
And then someone else responded and tore apart the argument by questioning why physical strength was critical to determining a character's worth. Sakura was physically weaker than her male comrades, but she could do so much more. More importantly, she could heal people.
Essentially, this someone else questioned why society values the traits that are gendered masculine (beating people up) and completely devalues the traits that are gendered feminine (healing and emotion and the like).
I vastly oversimplify the argument to get the point across, but that was when I stopped and things really clicked for me. I thought, "This is feminist theory. This is the idea behind feminism, not just asking why males are valued over females, but why masculinity is prized over femininity."
You can learn about something, but when you experience it or you see it in experience, it has so much more oomph.
Since then, I've interned with the Feminist Majority Foundation and I've taken several semi-gender studies classes at my school (classes I took for other purposes but were cross-listed with the gender studies department). I know a lot about the issues, but ...
On Teaching Feminism
There are topics I like to pretentiously consider myself an expert on (the fantasy genre and manga/anime), and topics I should be experts on but am not (like politics and international relations).
And then there's racism and sexism, or antiracism and feminism.
I don't consider myself an expert on either topics, and I'm always learning more, but it turns out that there are actually an awful lot of people who know less so I find myself actually teaching it to them even though I do not consider myself qualified in the least. There is nothing more terrifying than discussing interracial dating with a group of feminists and then realizing that none of them know about the exoticization of Asian women in white male-Asian girl relationships and why Asian men tend to be emasculated in the media and in American society in general, and that the conversation you thought you were having about interracial dating trends was actually you lecturing them except you totally haven't covered everything you would need to because you didn't realize they didn't know anything. (Okay, so maybe there are things more terrifying than that, but it can be a huge shock to realize how much some people you thought were so educated actually don't know.)
[And also, random side note, I've only recently begun to take note of how rarely intersectionality takes place in the real life, and how conversations about Asian women "selling out" by dating white men and/or discussions about interracial marriages almost always assume that white men are only dating Asian women because they're exotic and not because they might have good personalities, and how discussions of these trends often completely overlooks the individuals people's agency (please see an earlier rant about the passive-aggressive Asian American man on Craigslist for my exact opinion), and also how mainstream feminism does tend to focus on issues that are rather exclusively white, and how many classic feminist movies only have white women in them)
Whenever I have to give a mini "Feminism 101" or "Antiracism 101" spiel, it always greatly unnerves me because I don't feel qualified to be in a teaching position in that conversation, and also because I try to avoid having these conversations whenever possible. I am a lurker by nature on the Internet, and introverted by nature in real life. If my friends have opposing views, unless I am very, very, very close to them and know that we have compatible political views, I won't argue with them, won't voice my opinions, won't bring things up. I hate justifying myself, and I hate when I lose respect for my friends in the process.
Final Note
Finally, a note on definitions.
I am a feminist, and I am proud to be a feminist, but I know that not necessarily a lot of women are. A lot of women I would consider feminist don't identify as feminist, and there tend to be two types of reasons for this. First, there are the people who say, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." These are the people who are scared to identify as feminist solely because of the media portrayal of feminists.
(Please note, I also hate when people respond to this by saying, "Not all feminists are man-hating lesbians who don't shave." Guess what? I don't shave, and I know people who are lesbian, and I'm sure some feminists hate men-as-a-socially-constructed gender even while having no problem with individual men. And when you say that, you're really saying, "Not shaving, or being lesbian, is socially unacceptable and I don't identify with those feminists. I think they're gross, too." Which, if you don't realize why that would be problematic, I would rather not have this conversation with you.)
Anyways, those people I tend to be very frustrated with, because, hello, Christians have no problems identifying as Christian even though there are very radical Christians out there who bomb abortion clinics and firmly believe gay people are going to hell and I don't know, practical polygamy. Christians don't think, "I'm not a Christian, but I believe in Christianity" just because there are radical Christians, so I'm not certain why women say, "I'm not a feminist but I believe in feminism" just because there are radical feminists out there.
Then, there are the people who have issues with the feminist movement, specifically the waves that tended to exclude women of color and focus exclusively on white women's issues, occasionally at the expense of women of color. These people I also tend to refer to the previous argument about Christianity, but I give their concerns a ton more legitimacy because dissociating with a movement because of political disagreements and/or the movement's history and/or the mainstream movements issues is, in my mind at least, completely different from dissociating with the movement because of social stigma.
One of the things I love about feminism, though, as with any movement, is that there are opposing positions. And different people believe different things.
Oh, I guess there is a third group of people, people who identify with feminist principles but aren't currently activists, or aren't actively involved in the movement, so they feel bad identifying as feminist because they aren't doing enough.
My point was going to be, I believe that personal definitions of others are important and that other people's self-definitions are also important. I define feminism as "proponent of equality between women and men" and if I think you fall under that, that's what I think of you as. I try to respect your personal definition, of course, because I can't just impose my definitions on everyone and people get to define themselves as well.
I'm rapidly losing steam here so I'm going to end this now, but with a postscript.
Postscript
I started out intending to describe why I link feminism to fandom, and I discussed that a little but not really that much, so I wanted to finish up with where I see feminism in fandom today.
I lurk in the progressive parts of fandom, and I think that helps, but I see feminism in fanfic.
Fandom, you see, can be pretty sexist. I've been meaning to write an essay on feminism in fandom for the longest time, and this is most certainly not it, but that'll probably come tomorrow if I'm still in this procrastinatory mood. I take heart, though, from fanfiction. Nothing cheers me more than the femgenficathon, and this year, there's also a matrithon. People recognize that female characters are vastly underutilized, and they flesh them out through fanfiction.
Fanfiction is when you can take the sexist implications of the source material (canon) and subvert it however you wish. I've always found fiction a commentary on human nature/society/reality/the world, and I find fanfiction a commentary on fiction.
Someone on the flist the other day discussed fanfiction as literary criticism, and that is where fanfiction rests in my heart: a form of feminist literary criticism.
Okay, I'm done.
