Lotta Fogde writes in today’s Dagens Nyheter about feminism with a starting point in the now failed Clinton presidential campaign. Her analysis is that Hillary failed to present feminism as freedom movement for both sexes. Now feminism has never been mainstream in the US, as it has in Sweden, where prominent male politicians a few years ago couldn’t wait to proclaim their adherence to the feminist cause. But not anymore. People are dropping the feminist label like a hot coal, with minister of finance Anders Borg the most noted exception, even though his version of feminism is more about the liberal notion of individual (economic) freedom than about gendered power structures. Also here, in what is often called the most equal country in the world, is feminism failing to present itself as a broad movement which benefits everyone. It is instead seen as an extremist standpoint; women’s issues are “special interest” and in the same box as other “minority problems”.
As Lotta Fogde writes: “normal feminism” isn’t heard in the debate, and the word is associated with extremism and weirdos. Equality is debated, but it’s always construed as an individual issue rather than a systemic one. When studies for instance show that marriage means economic loss for women and economic gain for men, it’s always analyzed in terms of individual decisions rather than in broader, deeper structural terms. Which of course plays into the current political discourse where of “freedom of choice” and “individual responsibility” has replaced societal solidarity and collective solutions.
But I have a hard time agreeing with Fogde’s conclusions and wishes. She calls for a yearly broadly encompassing feminist congress “in an era where almost every sport and every sexual orientation has its own galas”. More consensus, then. She also calls for a resurrection of non-Socialist feminism, which certainly seems rather absent (with the exception of said minister of finance, that is). But I can’t see how such a cozy, “let’s all come together and forget our differences”, vanilla-flavored feminism can be the magic formula which will make inequality fade away. When more and more feminist, certainly the young ones, see the need for broad intersectional analysis which doesn’t only take gender into account but also race, class, sexual orientation, bodily ability, and so on, then a lowest common denominator approach can’t be the answer. I may agree with the minister of finance that 1. women are subordinated in society and 2. this needs to change, but then the similarity in opinion probably ends. When we have emptied our champagne glasses and the fun feminist get together is over, we will walk our separate ways, politely agreeing to disagree over how that subordination should be ended.
Entries (RSS)
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Do you suppose hiring a million high-priced consultants who’d never won an election for so much as Dead Animal Pickup Officer might have had something to do with it? and then listening to them?
Yeah, she may have been an old-school feminist who’d never heard of intersectionality and was clueless about how feminism was changing so dramatically , even up to the moment of her concession, but there’s still something to be said for the explicatory power of not having anybody on her staff who knew how to win.
I totally don’t minimize the article, which is way more insightful than I’ll be able to catch up with for a long, long time. Minus my quibble, thanks very much.