How I came to understand what feminism can mean
When I was maybe eight or nine years old, my mum taught me how to make tea. Boil two cups of water in a pot. Grate some ginger into it. Add a heaping spoon of tea leaves, turn off the heat and cover the pot immediately. After a couple of minutes, pour in some milk and a pinch of cardamom. Turn on the heat and stir. Serve piping hot!
A few days and many cups of tea later, she told me: When you get married, wake up before your mother-in-law does and have a cup of tea ready for her.
By the time I was in my teens, I contested deeply the “when” of my getting married and tried to wrest control of my choices, insisting that it was an “if.”
If I got married.
Was my resistance to that expectation an act of feminism?
My mother had been ill-treated by her mother-in-law in the initial years of her marriage. So was her attempt to protect me from pain in a future she conceived — with its inherent limitations — an even more radical act of feminism?
Is feminism always about breaking down barriers, or is it also about building up a community of care? About fighting the patriarchy — saying no to bullying, to unwanted sex or marriage, to unequal wages — or about reclaiming our brilliance, our joy?
Or, is the answer to the above questions simply: yes.
As with most women who don’t come across intersectional feminist thought in our daily lives, I relied on material experiences to understand this word, feminism, and live its implications.
Which is why when the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute that is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary asked me to speak about feminism for a panel this week, I took it as an opportunity to reflect on the journey so many of us undertake in our imaginings of feminism. To look at limitations in the version of feminism I was encountering, how that risks diminishing our potential and how interconnected it is, in reality, with so many aspects of life and culture.
The “lean in” brand of feminism — that Sheryl Sandberg was exhorting women to do since 2010 — felt unsatisfying. Women already worked hard, damn hard, as domestic workers, on farms, construction sites, in their homes. But even if viewed narrowly through a corporate lens, if I were to work hard, assert myself, climb the proverbial ladder, break glass ceilings, find “success” and not turn around and rewrite the rules so that other women have an easier go of it, what use would that empowerment truly be?
Even without explicit definitions, most people understand “feminism” as being about something to do with women.
But who is considered a woman? Women who were assigned male sex at birth, are at the forefront of this struggle today to be accepted as women without being reduced to individual body parts.
I learnt that many of us have to leave out intrinsic parts of ourselves if we wanted to belong to the audience targeted by much of the feminism I was encountering.
About a decade ago, a senior journalist told me hiring in media was biased toward four designated groups — women, members of a “visible minority,” persons with a disability and Aboriginal/Indigenous Peoples.
He told me if I applied, he would check the “visible minority” box. If I were disabled? The “disability” box. But still not the box for “women.”
By 2018, I was writing columns covering the “race and gender” beat. After I wrote a column following Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s death criticizing the western gaze on her legacy, a journalist who ought to have known better asked me: Will your next piece be about gender?
I found relief in the works of American journalist Rafia Zakaria, author of “Against White Feminism,” that formulated the words to my inner musings. Zakaria illustrates how western feminism was gatekeeping what are considered “feminist” issues, how it was universalizing its own concerns and agendas as being representative of all women and how it was complicit in endorsing the American war machine, exemplified in America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan in the name of “saving Afghan women.”
No wonder then so much of what constituted “feminist” issues is often limited to sexual and reproductive rights, intimate partner violence and gender wage gaps. Important issues, to be sure, but not all-encompassing.
The work of the Montreal-born American litigator, policy advocate and author Andrea Ritchie shed light on how police violence was a feminist issue. Her book “Invisible No More” outlined, for instance, cases in which officers responding to domestic violence calls sexually assaulted the Black women who called for help. Where “white feminism” would see police intervention as a solution to intimate partner violence, intersectional feminism would insist on broader solutions.
“Policing Black Lives” by Robyn Maynard remains the most dogeared book on my shelf. It reminds me that not only is racial violence a feminist issue, immigration is, too. She writes how Canada’s decadelong West Indian Domestic Scheme from 1955 — a targeted immigration program to bring Caribbean women to work in Canada as servants — “reproduced Black women’s economic, political and social subordination in Canadian society.”
In the course of an Atkinson fellowship I did on education, I learned from Anishinaabe teacher Colinda Clyne and Maori academic Mere Berryman among others how education, which reinforces white supremacist patriarchy, is also a feminist issue. More importantly, they demonstrated how transforming the education system is within our reach.
So, if everything is feminism, is nothing feminism?
Not really. It boils down to this: If feminism is at least partly about pushing back against the patriarchy, then a feminist’s first job is to identify patriarchy at play, learn how it is compounded by other oppressive hierarchies such as race, caste, class, and then join hands to smash it all in the quest to find our own unencumbered potential.
Transform, and even, as the late great Bell Hooks said, transgress sexual, racial and other artificially imposed boundaries to be free.
Self-empowerment alone can go only so far. Full feminism demands a community of care that uplifts and upholds women in their journeys.
This, then, is what I’ll be sharing with my daughter — and my son, when I next pour them some tea, served piping hot.