Young women redefining rights movement

Times & Transcript (Moncton)
Thu 11 Sep 2008

Page: D6
Section: Opinion
Byline: Ginette Pettitpas Taylor

What do young feminists want?

Don't expect young feminists to just update the women's movement to-do
list: "Check off a Charter of Rights -- we got it. Keep pay equity -- we still don't have it. Add a new issue, hypersexualization of girls."

Lists were then. This is now.

Young people today -- goes the refrain -- are faced with different issues growing up than those faced by generations that came before. This can be
said for all generations, but now, we live in a world that loves to
categorize people chronologically, into generational boxes -- Baby
Boomers, the Hippie Generation, Generations X and Y, the MTV Generation, the Tech-Generation -- each supposedly having its defining moments and issues which shape the experiences of those born into them.

In an increasingly globalized and technological world, communities form across lines -- across generations, borders, movements and genders. Anyone with Internet access can create a blog and share their views with the
world. Anyone with a camera can provide their own account of events to be viewed globally within minutes. The women's movement -- feminism -- is no exception.

Just how overwhelming a task it would be to "define today's feminism" hit me the other day when I read the program for the upcoming pan-Canadian young feminists' gathering, Toujours RebELLES 2008, to be held during the October long weekend in Montréal. I smiled as I noted that the proposed subjects range from women and militarization to the feminization of poverty; from women and the environment to
capitalism/neo-liberalism/de-commitment of the state/ privatizations, to Aboriginal women and colonization. A series on maternity stands
side-by-side with a workshop on sexual identity and heteronormativity,
followed by workshops on "methods of organizing and opposing" and women and racism.

I would expect nothing less from a conference created by and for young
feminists. This is as it must be if we hope to have the egalitarian
movement that the founding ideas demand. Today's young feminists are
making the links that need to be made.

Like the individuals who make it up, what is called the "Third Wave" of the women's movement itself is sometimes said to lack that one unifying purpose, to be a jumble of ideologies with little consensus emerging from the chaos. The earlier waves of feminism had overarching, objective goals -- the vote, sexual liberation, an end to sex discrimination in jobs and schools.

The focus of the new wave is an anti-focus, as it were, the opposite of a focus. Young feminists are taking "the personal is political" slogan of the previous wave, magnifying it one-hundred-fold, and running with it. Thanks to women's studies, to the women's movement, to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered rights movement, to the Internet and whatever else, young women's understanding of the connections between issues is deeper.

The word of the day is intersectionality -- the understanding of multiple ways of being and living that shape a person and how we experience the world, and in turn how the world treats them. The idea that one individual can be faced with a multitude of oppressions which can't be addressed individually any more than the person herself can be physically divided into pieces and be expected to survive.

Simply put, young feminists take as their mantra that feminism exists
within a world of other "isms", each with their own value to the person who has lived it. There can be no single goal of feminism because there is no single identifiable "feminist". If "women" is a generalization, "feminist" is a gross generalization.

One of the goals of young feminism has thus become ensuring that the
movement is egalitarian itself -- inclusive and open. Perhaps a disability exposes a woman to more discrimination in her job hunt than being female, or the fact that she is a recent immigrant to Canada is more debilitating to her attempts at breaking the glass ceiling than the fact that she is a woman, or the fact that her life partner is also a woman means she has extra difficulty integrating into her new community.

Mirlande Demers was a brilliant young Québec radio host and social
justice activist who died at age 26 this summer. At a conference, she once spoke about being kicked and called names because she is Black and being spoken about as if she wasn't there, right there, in her wheelchair. She said sometimes she doesn't know whether people exclude her because she is Black, a person with disabilities, a woman, an immigrant to Canada, young, French-speaking, or has blue hair. . . or if it's a combination. One thing she was sure, though, was that it is impossible to understand her life without considering all these elements at the same time and how these elements interact.

People, as the cliché goes, are like snowflakes. It is not simply
differences that must be acknowledged, but also how the experience of
these differences is affected by other differences and colour how men and women will engage in feminism, and their priorities in achieving equality.

Young feminists declare themselves feminists while doubting the assumption that being of the same gender is enough to have common interests and experiences. Just as past feminists were forced to rethink notions of femininity, sexuality and motherhood, the very notion of gender is now open for discussion. Past feminists made visible the historical sexism and the negative effects of sexual division of labour. The work continues to identify other differences made invisible by the compact roller mentality.

n Ginette Petitpas-Taylor, of Moncton, is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Her column on women's issues appears in the Times & Transcript every Thursday. She may be reached via e-mail at acswcccf@gnb.ca

© 2008 Times & Transcript (Moncton)

?Length: 958 words

For off-list questions or comments, please email janislockwood@gmail.com