As the U’s Women’s Week continues on campus, hosting a multitude of events supporting women’s issues, a female panel delivered a surprising message about popular feminist movements?that they can prove to the detriment of female global society.
The discussion titled, “(Self-) Righteous Babes: The Border Creep of Western Feminism,” was held Tuesday in the Union. The event hosted five speakers who voiced their opinions and concerns on the modern feminist ideal and its far-reaching implications.
The women, selected from various ethnicities and representing several university departments, said the modern feminist movement should be a unifying involvement, conscious of racial, socioeconomic and sexual identities.
“My identity as a woman is not separated from who I am,” said Karen Johnson, an education professor in ethnic studies, emphasizing that individual identities and backgrounds contribute to the feminist cause.
“It’s not [just] a struggle for women,” she said, noting many feminist movements worldwide also focus on fighting imperialism, patriarchy and other threats to foreign cultures.
Johnson joined scholars Carolyn Webber, Audrey Thompson, Khadija Khaja and Lisa Flores before a crowd of about 55 people. About one quarter of those in attendance were male.
While the women differed in their opinions, even on their preferred definitions of feminism, all agreed that liberal feminists, common in current western society, alienate women of different backgrounds and regard many global issues from ignorant and judgmental viewpoints.
A communication doctorate student, Webber expressed that she often felt excluded from Western feminism because of her Chicana background. Oftentimes, she said, white culture does not impose its values, but rather expects others to assimilate to them.
“[Western feminists] often do not listen, because they think that they know more than anyone else,” she said. “It’s a white supremacy, and they think they can speak for me.”
A social work doctorate student, Khaja affirmed Webber’s sentiments in examining feminist opinions critical of female circumcision, a practice common in Ghana and other African countries.
Khaja said that teachers and textbooks portray the practice in a harsh light, deeming it an atrocity and injustice to the female sex. In reality, she said, genital mutilation is a cultural practice embraced and accepted by the African women?much like breast implants in America.
“Many of us in feminism have to be careful and not jump the gun on other cultural practices,” she said. “We need to slow down and really respect other cultural practices and see through their eyes.”
An associate professor of philosophy, Thompson said the indoctrination of Western feminism in a university atmosphere where academia idealizes “white philosophy” and presents the Western majority as reasonable is the standard by which all other cultures are judged.
Thompson described the ideal feminist philosophy as a wall where everyone is a different brick, instead of the reality where women build barriers against each other and their varying feminist perspectives.
“We need to recognize aa diversity of feminism,” Johnson said. While women vary in their identities and feminist ideals, “[women] need to see that nothing’s wrong with that.”