Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson Kathie Sarachild Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dana Densmore by Fahs Breanne & Fahs Breanne

Author:Fahs, Breanne & Fahs, Breanne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2018-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

A RETURN TO “THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”

Conversations about sex, love, and bodies—particularly surrounding their relationship to feminist politics and larger institutional frameworks that inform these aspects of women’s lives—inevitably force a return to the feminist phrase “The personal is political.” In a later conversation with Dana and Roxanne, I asked them about the origins of that phrase, particularly as related to the development of a feminist politics of the body and sexuality. Dana responded by emphasizing the diverse meanings of the so-called personal and her perceived (though quite controversial) sense of how third-wave and second-wave feminism might differ on this:

I think that the third-wave people, they’re going on the assumption that the personal is political, except that they wouldn’t phrase it that way. I personally don’t like the phrasing because it’s too vague. What is personal? What does personal mean? Personal means a lot of different things to different people, but if what you’re getting at is whether feminism (which can be quite radical) can coincide with fun and games—maybe be sexy, or dress sexy, or be interested in celebrity this and that; all the pop culture trappings—that’s more of a third-wave understanding of “The personal is political.”63

Dana added that radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s thought of this quite differently, emphasizing a sense of shared suffering or shared oppression: “You thought it was just you. You thought it was your problem—you weren’t satisfied, your husband did this or that oppressive thing, you didn’t have an orgasm, and, you know, all these things you thought were personal but are, in fact, political.”64

Roxanne emphasized that early radical feminism did not quite fit in with second-wave liberal feminist ideas about social change and mobilization:

We’re a little odd. We’re not really ‘second-wave’ in the sense that Sara Evans describes in Personal Politics.65 She says “The personal is political” came out of SNCC [and was adopted by] Redstockings, but I disagree with some of the claims about race. Redstockings often said that they were tired of working in SNCC for “other people’s causes” and wanted to have their own thing. I mean, I hear this language that says, “Oh, I’m tired of it.” Well, see, I wasn’t tired of it, because I didn’t feel like I was going out for other people when I was doing antiapartheid work. I never felt like I was carrying on someone else’s struggle. I felt like it was my struggle for liberation in the world, so I have very different views.66

Radical feminists cared deeply about the minutiae of women’s lives, seeing in the mundane and ordinary tasks women engaged in an immense amount of possibility for social change. On housework, for example, Roxanne added, “I can see how, abstractly, housework is political, because it’s a social more that’s imposed artificially on people—so it’s in the political realm and has to be fought politically, and not personally. I just didn’t think a good solution was Wages for Housework.67 I’m for communal kitchens and men learning these tasks, which has mobilized a lot of young men to start cooking! Many of these men have feminist mothers.

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