Turncoat said:This is a sub-genre of Feminism, one can disagree with one version of it while still otherwise identifying as a Feminist overall.The first part supports your claim here, and I generally agree with the assessment as it does not allow us to obtain a richer understanding of the feminist project as a whole.
However, you will see their is valid objection to the particular definition you earlier brought up.
SEP said:However, some feminist scholars object to identifying feminism with these particular moments of political activism, on the grounds that doing so eclipses the fact that there has been resistance to male domination that should be considered “feminist” throughout history and across cultures: i.e., feminism is not confined to a few (White) women in the West over the past century or so. Moreover, even considering only relatively recent efforts to resist male domination in Europe and the United States, the emphasis on “First” and “Second” Wave feminism ignores the ongoing resistance to male domination between the 1920s and 1960s and the resistance outside mainstream politics, particularly by women of color and working class women (Cott 1987).
One strategy for solving these problems would be to identify feminism in terms of a set of ideas or beliefs rather than participation in any particular political movement. As we saw above, this also has the advantage of allowing us to locate isolated feminists whose work was not understood or appreciated during their time. But how should we go about identifying a core set of feminist beliefs? Some would suggest that we should focus on the political ideas that the term was apparently coined to capture, viz., the commitment to women’s equal rights. This acknowledges that commitment to and advocacy for women’s rights has not been confined to the Women’s Liberation Movement in the West. But this too raises controversy, for it frames feminism within a broadly liberal approach to political and economic life. Although most feminists would probably agree that there is some sense of rights on which achieving equal rights for women is a necessary condition for feminism to succeed, most would also argue that this would not be sufficient. This is because women’s oppression under male domination rarely if ever consists solely in depriving women of political and legal rights, but also extends into the structure of our society and the content of our culture, the workings of languages and how they shape perceptions and permeate our consciousness (e.g., Bartky 1988, Postl 2017).There is another good section that gives credence to those who feel the way Delora feels.
SEP said:In everyday conversation it is not uncommon to find both men and women prefixing a comment they might make about women with the caveat, “I’m not a feminist, but…”. Of course this qualification might be (and is) used for various purposes, but one persistent usage seems to follow the qualification with some claim that is hard to distinguish from claims that feminists are wont to make. For example, I’m not a feminist but I believe that women should earn equal pay for equal work; or I’m not a feminist but I’m delighted that first-rate women basketball players are finally getting some recognition in the WNBA. If we see the identification “feminist” as implicitly committing one to both a normative stance about how things should be and an interpretation of current conditions, it is easy to imagine someone being in the position of wanting to cancel his or her endorsement of either the normative or the descriptive claim. So, e.g., one might be willing to acknowledge that there are cases where women have been disadvantaged without wanting to buy any broad moral theory that takes a stance on such things (especially where it is unclear what that broad theory is). Or one might be willing to acknowledge in a very general way that equality for women is a good thing, without being committed to interpreting particular everyday situations as unjust (especially if is unclear how far these interpretations would have to extend). Feminists, however, at least according to popular discourse, are ready to both adopt a broad account of what justice for women would require and interpret everyday situations as unjust by the standards of that account. Those who explicitly cancel their commitment to feminism may then be happy to endorse some part of the view but are unwilling to endorse what they find to be a problematic package.The upshot here is that some may agree with particular feminist aims, which in themselves have controversial meanings in the different sects of feminism, they are unwilling to accept the additional moral baggage inherent in the different sects of feminism.
This article only touches on this topic briefly, and leaves a lot to be wanted so I want to draw further attention on it given its importance to this conversation.
Beyond moral baggage there is a lot of philosophical baggage as well given the necessity to make certain assumptions in any philosophy or movement.
For instance original feminist philosophy during its first real consciousness in the west was fundamentally Essentialist, merely debating the nature of that essentialism as it relates to women and men. However, there are good arguments against essentialism many of which being made by femisim itself (current identity based feminism is fundamentally anti-essentialist in its arguments that gender is fundamentally a construct). We can oppose this feminism or support with reason, those who do on the feminist front are often called terfs.
There is gender nominalism,
Again there are endless arguments against and for nominalism, hence we can reasonably carry or not carry this baggage.
There is gender realism,
Hasslanger, SEP said:S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.
S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)Again endless arguments against realism in general and in its relation to sex/gender, many of them coming from the nomanlists.
Interestingly, we ca object to all the above including feminism in all its forms via skepticism (to name one) which, in general, would deny all of their epistemological foundations.
In short, there is good reason to be a feminist in the sense that it can be a well thought out position, and there are good reasons to not be a feminist in the sense it can be well thought out position. Beyond that, one can even not be a feminist while still supporting feminist goals given one can object to the philosophical assumptions common to most forms of feminism.
Informative, thanks!
