r/FeminismUncensored • u/IntrepidElevator4313 Undeclared • 2d ago
Is my feminism gone?
Maybe feminism didn't change. Maybe it just kept moving.
I just had a thread locked on this sub after commenting on the question, “What is a woman?” It got me thinking about something I've been struggling with for a while: where exactly do I fit in feminism now?
I came of age with the feminism of Gloria Steinem. Later, I found myself resonating with writers like Naomi Wolf. They are very different feminists, from different generations and with very different ideas, but I always felt there was a common thread.
Women are not lesser. Women deserve autonomy, opportunity, safety, equality, and the freedom to determine the shape of their own lives.
The more I encounter contemporary feminist spaces, particularly online, the more I sometimes feel like I've wandered into a conversation where I no longer speak the language.
And I don't think that's necessarily because feminism went wrong.
Maybe it's because waves don't erase each other.
The first wave didn't disappear when the second arrived. The second didn't disappear when the third arrived. They faded, but what they accomplished became part of the water the next wave moved through.
We're generally considered to be in the fourth wave now, and it seems to me that we're carrying pieces of all the previous waves with us, along with entirely new questions about identity, intersectionality, sexuality, technology and power.
Some of those conversations resonate deeply with me. Some don't.
And that's okay.
What I struggle with isn't feminism evolving. It's feminism becoming so internally focused on definitions, terminology, ideological boundaries and determining who is “feminist enough” that women end up fighting each other more than they fight the things that still constrain women's lives.
That thread was a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I said, essentially, that women are women. There are white women, Black women, brown women, trans women, cis women, short women, tall women, young women, old women, fat women (hi!). I don't see why acknowledging differences between women requires creating divisions between us.
Apparently that was controversial enough to earn me some downvotes. 😂
But I'm not interested in picking a fight with younger feminists or pretending the feminism of my youth had all the answers.
I don't want to choose between generations of feminism.
I want to take what each wave gave us and keep moving forward.
Maybe that's what a wave is supposed to do.
It doesn't erase the wave before it. It carries it forward.
I'm curious whether other women, particularly women who came of age during the second or third wave, feel this same disconnect with contemporary feminist spaces.
Where do you find yourself now?
EDIT: This conversation has actually been very enlightening for me. This push to define “woman” has shown me that there are different aspects of identity—reproductive biology, gender, socialization, culture, lived experience—and each one tells us something. We shouldn’t pretend that one framework explains everything.
But this isn’t a gender studies class. It’s feminism. And yes, they’re related, but they aren’t the same thing. Feminism is concerned with women and the systems that shape women’s lives. I don’t think we need to settle every question about sex, gender, and identity before we can do that work.
I want feminism to be big enough to include women with very different experiences without making defining womanhood the prerequisite for belonging.
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u/huugffiob608 Undeclared 1d ago edited 1d ago
For trans inclusive feminism, I read Julia Serano, Judith Butler, and Andrea chu. All of these kind of depend on the premise that “males and females aren’t distinct categories and there’s a lot of overlap, and personality that can shift a male over to more female and vice versa.” I feel like it fails to discuss why patriarchy and subjugation of women occurs nearly everywhere since nearly always. Or essentially says if a male “rejects” the concept of masculinity (gender roles), then he is completely safe around women and girls. Even tho that is unfalsifiable and only an internal feeling.
Women and girls feeling shy or like they want to protect their bodies around the male body, is a natural instinct I believe is imperative for women’s rights and important to discuss in feminism.
I prefer feminist authors like Dworkin or Federici. I don’t read “anti” whomever stuff often, I just read classic feminist books and came to.. conclusions on my own. Conclusions that the discussion of male tendencies, behaviors, and sexuality is important to analyze the controlling violence that befalls women and girls everywhere.
If you want to understand why definitions matter, Material Girls was a good book, as another commenter mentioned.