I hereby interrupt my own half-assed hiatus to clarify something. Belledammit Belledame has deviously generously tagged me for the Thinking Blogger Awards, and while my response in turn is nowhere close to being ready, her characterization of me in her post gave me pause:
Victoria is a thoughtful, empathic*, and eloquent radical feminist, with much to say both personal and political. We challenge each other, I do believe; and yet there’s enough common ground to make a connection, which pleases me, as she’s good people.
Now I’m going to have to add to my paradoxical working list of things Belledame has in common with Twisty Faster. (Thing #1: She routinely sends me running to the dictionary, as I have bitched previously. Thing #2: she’s frightfully prolific; there’s no damn way for me to keep up with the volume of her posts and commentaries.)
But my third item for this queer** little list is that I wind up spilling shit in comments on her blog that are mini-blog posts in their own right. As with a recent post of Twisty’s, which prompted my recent declaration of Oh no, I’ve said (perhaps) too much.
Which brings me to my point (yes, I have one!). Namely, that I dunno if I really qualify for the “radical feminist” moniker at this point.
Yet to offer, whether at Belledame’s blog or right here, an apparent public refutation of my “radical feminism” per se is problematic in all sorts of ways. For one thing, it might be (incorrectly) assumed that I think radical feminism is a bad or somehow undesireable thing. Nay, this is hardly the case.
Fact is, radfems kick ass, and I loves ‘em.
Rather, I no longer label myself as a radical feminist because, given an objectively unknowable ratio of “freely chosen to compelled-by-life-circumstances” decisions I have made in my life, both in the psychic aftermath of leaving Minnesota, and in the verifiably post-emergency years following, when I might have made a very different set of choices, with a different partner in a different part of the world, I believe I’ve lost the right to call myself that. (Like I lost the right to call myself a lesbian when I married Jeff. Yeah I know, there are self-declared lesbians who have freely chosen sex with and/or marriages to men, but I just don’t get that, and I’m not going to insult the lesbian separatist I used to be with any such bizarre assertions, no matter how authentically woman-identified I will always be.)
Nor do I mean to imply, with the above assertions, that radical feminists have themselves (as individuals or en masse) somehow kicked me out of any radical feminism “club.” Sure, I’ve taken some of the expected snark about being a “hasbian” and whatnot, but those are really uncontestable charges, and as such, it doesn’t personally hurt me.
Bah. What I mean, in any event, is just what I said over at her place, so I’ll go ahead and do the ol’ copy-n-paste (full text here):
…For the record, I don’t necessarily describe myself as a radical feminist, as much as I identify with radical feminism and with radfems much more often than not.
Yes, I have recently described myself as “radical” (in the sense of getting to the roots of things… ironically, you’re the one who offered that characterization in your comment here), and I’m certainly a feminist and I’ve posted a great deal of meandering autobiography about my lifelong adventures in radical feminism as such. (For that matter, I’ve written about my adventures in lesbian separatism, too, yet the bona fide Big Hairy Man I live with rather disproves the premise that I can still be credibly called that.)
Maybe what I mean is something like this: if radical feminism were a country, then I would be one if its most curiously nostalgic exiles ever.
(More on this and related themes in my damned near complete manuscript which, nonetheless, I keep managing to not send out: How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land.)
And now, the postscript:
Certainly, I’m not the only soul on earth grappling with the matter of one’s identification (or, as the case may be, former identification) with radical feminism, in ways that aren’t hatefully distorting and dismissive of radical feminism and/or of radfems personally… certainly, there’s no shortage of that available on the internets, which I’m not going to link to here.
Most notably, AradhanaD does an awesome, deeply thoughtful job of discussing her own struggles with this moniker in this brilliant comment at Witchy Woo’s . Her struggles, of course, are distinct from mine, but I find much in her comments to relate to; had I been aware of that discussion at the time it was in active percolation mode, I would have tossed in a comment or two, but as a latecomer I’ll just have to post this linkage instead, and hope it means something.
*Dunno if she meant to say I was empathetic, or if, indeed, she meant to infer that I have awesomely spooky psychic powers. Damn, I’d hate to have to choose between the two.
** In various senses of the word.
Tags:
blogosphere,
hybridity,
Identity,
Minnesota,
privilege,
radical feminism
