Tuesday, May 30, 2017

I've Been Noticing This, Myself

The Western-Centric Nature of Intersectional Feminisism:
Attempts by non-intersectional feminists and human rights activists to discuss honour based violence are frequently shut down by western intersectional feminists who will immediately change the subject to domestic violence experienced by western women. 

 Any conversation about the horror of female genital mutilation is likely to be derailed away from girls in danger right now to a lecture on the pre-Islamic origins of the practice. Any attempts to discuss gender-specific modesty veiling will almost certainly result in a claim that Muslim women are exercising their own choice and are somehow magically free of the paralysing societal pressures claimed to be experienced by western feminists. When a petition to criminalise cat-calling and other gender-based annoying behaviour gets more than 58,000 signatures but a petition to strengthen multi-agency responses to ‘honour’-based violence receives only 406 (and consequently will not be addressed by parliament), people could be excused for thinking western non-Muslim feminists only care about themselves.
Most of the feminists with whom I've worked and lived have been first and second-generation, those dedicated to ensuring that there is equity in employment and educational opportunities.  One cannot be the son of the first woman in her family to earn both under-graduate and graduate degrees, and be married to one of the generation of women first ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church, and not have an appreciation for their struggle and success.

Contemporary, third-wave feminism, or intersectional feminism, is more interested in a neo-Marxist world-view, with the politicization of, well, everything and the division of the human race into ever smaller and more detailed categories, with shifting rules of acceptance.  The only constant is that the "patriarchy", another term of nebulous definition, is the cause of any political or personal limitation.