“Am I a bad feminist?”
I find myself often in that camp, as a junior scholar just starting out, the incidents I have witnessed in academia often warrants a metaphorical double-back, whether my interpretation of situation was ‘correct’ and in line with my desire to be a ‘good’ feminist. But what is a ‘good’ and what is a ‘bad’ feminist?
I write this not having an answer, but perhaps as a display of a struggle that I think about quite often. As a women of colour, raised to be an overachiever, to put my head down to study, indoctrinated in the ‘do well and then the rest of life will come’ attitude in life, this perfectionism still haunts my life and currently undergoing some rewiring. But maybe this struggle of being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feminist is also intrinsically rooted in having to be a good ‘feminist’ well. I feel like I am asked to take the oppression I have witnessed or endured, and immediately turn it into fuel for the fight for gender equality — but often times, I am afraid of admitting that I have doubts whether my interpretation is in line with progressive ideologies (also another issue to discuss). I quote gender scholars that I admire, but also fear I might have missed a modicum of backlash they might have received and gosh, now, I have just became that person that quoted that other person. I am also reminded of Spivak’s work on ‘epistemic violence’ discussed in Dotson (2011) — what are the harmful practices of silencing that have occurred in our pursuit of what is ‘good’?
My research proposals have often examined the ‘gendered effects’ of a certain occupational sectors, and I recall one professor asking me — what exactly do you mean by ‘gendered’? Great question. I used it as a tool to investigate the differences between men and women in a phenomena but I have increasingly struggled with defining this. In order to study ‘gendered’ differences, there is a certain implication of something that is, not something is ought— and maybe that is not our job to figure out what is ought (thought I disagree with this as an academic). But what is is constantly changing, similar to the gendering process is evolving and ongoing, we are arduously learning — I am reminded that my interpretations at times might differ from others. But that is alright.
In my schooling, one of the most puzzling moments etched into my mind was the accusation from a women-identifying professor that our class (of all women) treated her differently because she was a women. That has never left me. The ‘good’ feminist in me struggled — I have failed this professor in making her feel such distress in her work. Did my implicit biases and unintended micro-aggressions make her feel this way? But this is where I think when we are so caught on evaluating ourselves as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we miss the mark of being ‘decent’. We did not treat her different because she was a women — we made the suggestions we made because the matter at hand was an issue of decency. But in a discussion with a fellow researcher, we explored how we have both witnessed professors who had to stand firm and perhaps neglect ‘decency’ at times to make a point — maybe they were not afforded ‘decency’ in their days and to make their mark, they were taught a certain way of behave, act…to stand. Subsequently, we both then asked: “are we bad feminists for thinking that?”
As researchers, as a racialized women, maybe there is no easy response to answer that question. But I also have to stop seeing it as a grade I need to excel at - I need to question more, I want to partake in the observation of the gendering process where I get to witness, think and then react to what I see.
Writer Roxane Gay wrote in her column:
“I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
I think I am a feminist-in-progress.
