Africana Theory, Policy, and Leadership by Jr. Conyers

Author:Jr. Conyers [Conyers, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138518643
Google: YHByswEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-02T04:35:01+00:00

Defining Feminism through Africana Studies: Normative Challenges and Exemplars

Curiously, the complexity and definitional quandary of the word feminism disappears when feminists interface with women outside the academy, when they are seeking to recruit women to feminism and/or when they are redefining famous women in history as feminists. In their efforts to win the hearts and minds of ordinary women, feminists often represent feminism in the exact opposite way they do in the academy. Outside of the academy, in popular culture and social media, feminism is represented as an uncomplicated and simple idea. The radical oversimplification of the meaning of feminism is epitomized by the typical sanitized definition of feminism commonly found in the average dictionary. The standard dictionary defines feminism as simply the belief that women should have the same social, economic, and political rights as men; or the movement for equality between the sexes. The standard dictionary definitions of feminism are very misleading and ascribe an untenable meaning to this word. There is no hint of the definitional heterogeneity and competing social constructions of the concept posited by the hyphenated approach feminists have historically used to define feminism, nor are the contested aspects of the nature of the term reflected in the typical dictionary definitions of this word. There are a variety of shortcomings with these “definitions,” and there is far more to feminism than these generic definitions imply. Dictionary definitions of feminism should not be accepted at face value for a variety reasons, including the fact that they are such pedestrian and politically self-serving representations of the meaning of this word. The average person uninitiated in the discourses of feminism would remain fundamentally unenlightened and misinformed about the deeper meaning of feminism. They would not acquire enough information to gain a proper and meaningful understanding of this term. Most significantly, these definitions fail to convey what is unique about feminism or what sets it apart from other theories or ideologies. What sets feminism apart or rather what is unique about feminism is not its advocacy for equality for women but rather its unique and distinctive approach to advocacy for women and more specifically its way of framing gender and the constellation of related issues.

The dictionary definitions of feminism are deficient and overreach because they convey the false idea that mere acceptance of the principle of equality between the sexes by definition makes a person a feminist and by extension an advocate of feminism. Automatically subsuming under the label of feminist everyone who believes in gender equality is an unacceptable approach to defining feminism. If we accept this as the litmus test for feminism then a person cannot be in favor of gender equality without being a feminist, a classic example of the compulsory dynamics of feminism. This is the faulty premise embedded in the misleading dictionary definitions that cede to feminism an unequivocal proprietary claim over the struggle for gender equality. This approach subordinates nonaligned women and progressive men, who without equivocation are equally committed to advancing the interests of women.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.