Writ­ten for Hyphen on Novem­ber 24, 2009.

For most of my life, I’ve acted the part of the fiery fem­i­nist activist. At age 10 (before I even knew “fem­i­nist” as a word) my sur­pris­ingly cogent defense of bib­li­cal Eve moved my evan­gel­i­cal father into sur­ren­der­ing his argu­ment that women are the root of all evil. At age 16 (when I only knew “fem­i­nist” as a term of deri­sion) I scan­dal­ized my Fil­ipino teach­ers by con­duct­ing an (albeit ama­teur­ish) study chart­ing gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion within Repub­lic Cen­tral high schools. And by age 19 (when I proudly donned my first sig­na­ture “this is what a fem­i­nist looks like” t-shirt) my trans­for­ma­tion seemed com­plete. In those enlight­ened times, I was fond of telling peo­ple, “You’re prob­a­bly a fem­i­nist — you just don’t know it yet.”

So thrilled was I to have found a word — an ide­ol­ogy, a move­ment! — which embod­ied my long-standing belief sys­tem that I didn’t real­ize until much later the fool­ish­ness of such a procla­ma­tion; fem­i­nism isn’t, after all, defined by one’s inher­ent, unar­tic­u­lated views on gen­der (how­ever pro­gres­sive those may be), but is rather a con­scious, polit­i­cal choice one makes after con­sid­er­ing and assert­ing those views.

These days, a much more edu­cated, expe­ri­enced, and cyn­i­cal Me teeters on the fence. Some days, I hear fem­i­nism derided by an igno­ra­mus with a beer and the beast inside rears its rosy head in indig­na­tion. Other days, my oft-broken heart smarts at the mem­ory of old friends and activists whose fem­i­nist ideals didn’t stand in the way of their mar­gin­al­iz­ing a per­son of color, or objec­ti­fy­ing another woman, or even down­play­ing the sex­ual assault of a friend. Most of the time, my com­mit­ment to social jus­tice advo­cacy doesn’t feel as though it requires a label so I have the room to vacillate.

How­ever, my inde­ci­sion piques about every six months.

Every six months, you see — almost by the minute hand — a media storm about “the death of fem­i­nism” inex­plic­a­bly erupts. Ten months out of the year, fem­i­nism is a dor­mant issue, old hat, a moot point, insignif­i­cant in both the grand scheme of world news and the nar­row sights of news­mak­ers. But every six months, respectable news mag­a­zines and main­stream news­pa­pers alike ded­i­cate valu­able col­umn inches to 1) redun­dant and irrel­e­vant asser­tions that fem­i­nism is, in fact, dead and 2) rebut­tals that, in 2000 pretty words, re-tell the “for­got­ten” his­tory of fem­i­nism while claim­ing that fem­i­nism is still thriv­ing — if nowhere else than online. Some­times the cat­a­lyst is a par­tic­u­larly well-timed arti­cle, while other times it’s a Hillary Clin­ton sound byte. This month, it’s a com­bi­na­tion of Sarah Palin fever and the recent release of women-themed books by Gail Collins, and Leslie Sanchez.

The agi­ta­tors are dif­fer­ent each round, but the debate is always the same and so, accord­ingly, is my response: mild enthu­si­asm at a sub­ject that inter­ests me, with a zesty pinch of irri­ta­tion at the tedious­ness of this cycle. But both sen­ti­ments are quickly over­shad­owed by dis­ap­point­ment, because, in almost every case, this tire­some debate about the death of fem­i­nism is a debate between white women (and the occa­sional white man) who are defin­ing fem­i­nism accord­ing to their own expe­ri­ence. I sup­pose there isn’t any­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with writ­ing about one’s own expe­ri­ence (I do it all the time), but the prob­lem is that when these cir­cu­lar debates roll around, that unac­knowl­edged white fem­i­nist expe­ri­ence becomes the only vis­i­ble fem­i­nist experience.

Among these dozens of mediocre arti­cles, a few have stood out because of their beau­ti­ful com­po­si­tion and thought­ful arguments…but even those few leave me want­ing some­thing more, pro­long­ing my inde­ci­sion rather than resolv­ing it. Last spring, my favorite “Is fem­i­nism dead?” piece was an Amer­i­can Prospect arti­cle called “The End of the Women’s Move­ment” which argued very elo­quently that there will not, and ought not, be a sin­gu­lar women’s move­ment in this coun­try today because such a move­ment could not ade­quately rep­re­sent the grow­ing diver­sity of com­mu­ni­ties, beliefs, and women in this coun­try. Great point. Except that the point is built on the notion that a time actu­ally existed when a sin­gu­lar women’s move­ment did ade­quately rep­re­sent the diver­sity of women in this coun­try — and that’s sim­ply not true.

One of Amer­i­can feminism’s great­est fail­ures is the exclu­sion of women of color, of poor women, of women with­out priv­i­lege. To para­phrase bell hooks, who do you think took care of the mid­dle class white woman’s chil­dren when she became too empow­ered to just be a house­wife? 2009 isn’t the first time our coun­try has enter­tained a vast diver­sity of com­mu­ni­ties, beliefs, and women — there has always been diver­sity here, though the smil­ing white faces at the fore­front of the last U.S. women’s move­ment might have us believe oth­er­wise. Assert­ing the present need for diver­sity within fem­i­nism with­out recall­ing the marked exclu­sion of women of color from past fem­i­nist waves isn’t a step for­ward so much as a white­wash­ing of fem­i­nist his­tory. And that makes me won­der where I fit within this paradigm.

Fast-forward to this month, and I’m both fawn­ing over and winc­ing at the beautifully-composed New Yorker piece writ­ten by Ariel Levy (of whom I am a huge fan), which argues that iden­tity pol­i­tics gets in the way of real progress because it is pri­mar­ily con­cerned with representation:

[Iden­tity pol­i­tics are] a ver­sion of the old spoils sys­tem: align your­self with other mem­bers of a group — Irish, Ital­ian, women, or what­ever — and try to get a big­ger slice of the resources that are being allocated.

Such a nar­row view of “iden­tity pol­i­tics” fails to con­sider the crit­i­cal role they play in engag­ing peo­ple of color in fem­i­nist (or any other kind of) activism, and assumes that “rep­re­sen­ta­tion” is a rel­a­tively straight-forward idea. For many sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion cit­i­zens, for exam­ple, rep­re­sen­ta­tion isn’t as sim­ple as sex and skin color, but entails the con­fronta­tion of colo­nial his­to­ries and racial and cul­tural hier­ar­chies that have fol­lowed us across generations.

I know many sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion Fil­ip­ina Amer­i­cans who retain a colo­nial men­tal­ity with regard to our mother coun­try that pre­vents them from under­tak­ing Filipina-specific fem­i­nist work — despite the admit­tedly pro­found need for such work. Melinda L. De Jesus addresses this in the pref­ace to her book, Pinay Power: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­ory, dis­cussing the ways in which “a her­itage of dual colonization…coupled with Amer­i­can cul­tural impe­ri­al­ism, has left an indeli­ble mark on the Fil­ipino Amer­i­can psy­che,” caus­ing them to regard their cul­tural her­itage as inher­ently infe­rior to that of the United States. She reflects on some of the expe­ri­ences that informed her own col­o­niza­tion expe­ri­ence as a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Fil­ip­ina American:

The arro­gant white fem­i­nist pro­fes­sor chid­ing me that I shouldn’t “ghet­toize” myself and my aca­d­e­mic train­ing by “just doing Asian Amer­i­can Stud­ies.” My par­ents telling me that “Fil­ipinos had no cul­ture before the Span­ish came.” […] I learn to for­get that my par­ents have accents, that they speak a lan­guage I don’t know — a lan­guage they did not teach me. I learn than it’s bet­ter to be “here” than “back home,” that bad stuff hap­pened dur­ing “the war.” And because my par­ents have so many dreams for my Amer­i­can future, I learn to dis­tance myself from my his­tory. When asked, I say, “My par­ents are from the Philip­pines, but I was born here.” So this is the Amer­i­can dream — liv­ing in the per­pet­ual present, mov­ing through life with­out a past, swal­lowed whole, invis­i­ble, but unable to deny the lin­ger­ing ache of absence…

De Jesus’s expe­ri­ence is not unique among sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion Fil­ip­ina Amer­i­cans in the Dias­pora; many of the con­trib­u­tors to Pinay Power describe sim­i­lar feel­ings of infe­ri­or­ity, alien­ation, and invis­i­bil­ity, which pre­vented them from con­nect­ing to, and acti­vat­ing around, their her­itage. One con­trib­u­tor argues that the only anti­dote to the “alien­ation of the col­o­nized self” is a recla­ma­tion of the eth­nic self, while another asserts that “the project of decol­o­niza­tion hinges on iden­tity politics.”

Dias­poric Fil­ip­inas with their erased his­to­ries and dual alien­ation, ought to engage in iden­tity pol­i­tics to the extent that doing so can help them place them­selves within a social, polit­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal, and cul­tural con­text that recon­nects them with their her­itage while attun­ing them to the oppres­sion they expe­ri­ence as a mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­nity in the United States.

….But where is that in the main­stream fem­i­nism rep­re­sented in the media — or even in our women’s stud­ies classes where we learn about women in pop­u­lar cul­ture and body image while remain­ing igno­rant of the transna­tional issues that are shap­ing the whole wide world? South­east Asia is chock full of fem­i­nist schol­ars and activists who are still agi­tat­ing at the front lines even as the arti­cles we read in our favorite pub­li­ca­tions tell us that con­tem­po­rary fem­i­nist work=blogging.

And so I remain on the fence — heart­ened, def­i­nitely, by the work of those transna­tional activists who call them­selves fem­i­nists even in the face of their under-representation — but daunted, nev­er­the­less, by the fem­i­nism I read about here, in U.S. papers and see on the Amer­i­can screen.

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