I was sitting in my Cultural Anthropology class the other day, and the professor asked the class how many of us are feminist, and only two people raised their hands. The Professor was shocked, and openly wondered why so many of her students (the majority female no less) were not feminists. I had suggested that perhaps the term had become too saturated and no one in here felt comfortable enough to profess a belief in something they didn’t properly understand. The Professor gave me an incredulous look that signaled her assessment of my explanation, and had a student look feminist up in the dictionary, which yielded the following, “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men” . She asked again, “Why aren’t you all feminists?”
I thought she made my point rather well, but I didn’t pursue it further. There is a tendency for activists of any cause to distill their ideals down to its barest simplicity, and reframe the position in terms that just about any person can identify with. A classic example is the position of Pro Life in the abortion debate, that position is described in a such a way that the negation of it is to be Pro Death or in the very least, against life itself. Those are not the kind of terms people wish to associate themselves with, while just about anyone, despite their views on abortion would identify as Pro Life.
As the class progressed, the Professor began unpacking what exactly it means to be a feminist, and how this commitment to feminism begins to color how one begins to critically assess their own culture in terms of gender and sex equality. She could not have explained a hermeneutic of suspicion more clearly, with even a discussion of how one might perceive male hegemony in even women wearing high heels.
I thought her examples were great and that they reaffirmed my own sneaking suspicion that feminism isn’t so simple, and that the concept requires much more unpacking than what a dictionary provides. A person might consider themselves feminist with their own notions of what kind of equality they’d like to see, but I don’t doubt that same person might outright reject a feminist understanding of social criticism or literary theory.
For me, all this raises meta-questions about the discipline of cultural anthropology. Are there meta-discussions about the methods one is supposed to use in studying one’s own culture? It’s one thing to study gender issues in small populations that exist on the edges of dominant cultures, but surely those same methods fall short when applying them to our own culture. Durkheim thought one could study religion without judging it, but I think the enlightenment project of reaching objectivity in the social sciences is long since dead, and it is much more fruitful to take a careful inventory of the baggage one brings to a study, instead of leaving it at home. How much more does that apply to the study of the culture you exist in and identify with?
