Here's a critique of the term "white feminism".
extract
When I was in grad school, I got into a heated debate with a classmate who insisted that “white feminism” was a serious problem in the women’s movement. The man (who was white and from the United States) argued that, “white feminism” meant that the women’s movement had centered the lives and experiences of only a select few — privileged white women in the US who traveled mainly in academic circles — “for most of its history.”
I told him I thought the term functioned as a tool to dismiss second wave feminists, glorify the (very problematic) third wave, and encourage infighting among feminists, creating divisions in a movement where collective struggle is crucial. His claim was at odds with the grassroots movement I’d grown up with in the Dominican Republic, which was obviously not led by women in the US (and certainly not by upper-class white women or academics). There are legitimate problems within feminism in my home country, particularly around class difference, but there is far more solidarity than animosity, and Dominican feminism has been consistent in addressing the struggles of rural, working class, and immigrant women.
Notably, during my time as an immigrant in the US, most of the people who complained to me about what they called “white feminism” were white themselves. I felt tokenized; like they wanted me, as a Dominican woman of colour, to validate them and their feminism. I became suspicious of all white people who used the term. Criticizing “white feminism” seemed to be a way for white people to present themselves asdifferent, betterwhite people — as cool, “intersectional” feminists who just happen to be white.
Now that I am back in the Dominican Republic doing shelter work, I believe my friend from grad school was right about one thing: white feminism is real. It is epitomized by gender identity ideology.
The current trend among third wavers, as well as among progressives, is to argue that we can ignore whether people were born male or female and insteaduse language like“genderfluid,” “multi-gender,” or “genderqueer.” But there’s a massive gap between this language — popularized within Gender Studies classrooms in the West — and the realities of marginalized women in countries like mine.
I’ve been thinking about what gender identity means in the context of the Global South. What does gender identity mean for women and girls who look like me? What does it mean for Dominican women and girls who are marginalized not just by sex, but by poverty, race, and xenophobia?
Recently, the Dominican Republic has been debating whether or not tooutlawchild marriage. The country hasthe highest rateof child marriage in the Latin American and Caribbean region. According to a2014 survey, 37 per cent of women who are between 20 and 49 years old got married (or became common law partners) before they were 18. The survey also shows that one in five girls between 15 and 19 are in a relationship with a man who is at least 10 years their senior. There is a strong correlation between child marriage and teen pregnancy, which can result indangerous health complicationsfor girls, like blood poisoning, obstructed labour, andhigh blood pressure. Indeed, teen pregnancy is thenumber one cause of deathfor teen girls worldwide. This is particularly worrisome because the Dominican Republic prohibitsall abortion, even in the cases when the mother’s life is in danger.
Plan International, a children’s rights organization,published a studyin March, looking at child marriage on the south side of the Caribbean island. They interviewed men who married underage girls, as well as the girls who “chose” these marriages. Almost 40 per cent ofthe men interviewedsaid they preferred younger girls because they were “more obedient and easier to control.” The study also revealed that many girls marry older men hoping to escape family violence and poverty, but then face violence from these men once they are married. One 15-year-old girl who was interviewed for the study said:
“I got married because I needed to run away from home. They were beating me. They used sticks. They wouldn’t trust me. One day I said: ‘I don’t want to live like this anymore.’ At home, there was a lot of fighting, one day in front of everybody, they beat me, in the middle of the street. So, I started working at a household. I was 11 years old. It was even worse there, the violence increased. I had to do all the chores, including washing all the clothes by hand. They wouldn’t even let me go to school and they never paid me because they said that they already gave me food. I was suffering a lot. I felt imprisoned I couldn’t even go to the park. I wanted to get married to leave all of that. I thought that if I got married I was going to be in a calm house, that I would be able to eat, sleep and go out. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be like that, like another hell.”
In the Dominican Republic, boys are not expected to clean or help raise their siblings — that is the responsibility of girls. Prior to marriage, 78 per cent of the girls who participated in thePlan Internationalstudy said they were put in charge of doing household chores like cleaning and caring for their younger siblings. When girls were asked what it means to be a woman, most said that it meant being a mother and a wife.
Continues: dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/patriarchy/gender/white-feminism-thing-gender-identity-ideology-epitomizes/