Living a Feminist Life

In a world in which human is still defined as man, we have to fight for women and as women.

There is no guarantee that in struggling for justice we ourselves will be just.

Just to talk about sexism and racism here and now is to refuse displacement; it is to refuse to wrap your speech around postfeminism or postrace, which would require you to use the past tense (back then) or an elsewhere (over there)

We could call this a postfeminist fantasy: that an individual woman can bring what blocks her movement to an end; or that feminism has brought “sexism, sexual exploitation or sexual oppression” to an end as if feminism has been so successful that it has eliminated its own necessity (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009); or that such phenomena are themselves a feminist fantasy, an attachment to something that was never or is no longer.

Feminism will be intersectional “or it will be bullshit,” to borrow from the eloquence of Flavia Dzodan

When did feminism become a word that not only spoke to you, but spoke you, spoke of your existence, spoke you into existence? When did the sound of the word feminism become your sound?

Where there is hope, there is difficulty.

is not at the expense of struggle but animates a struggle; hope gives us a sense that there is a point to working things out, working things through.

The figure of the feminist policer is exercised because she is useful; hearing feminists as police is a way of not hearing feminism.

What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up.