Every activist has hir pet issues. Feminists, especially. Mine are gender and sexuality.

It’s not that I don’t care about abortion rights; I do. It’s not that I don’t care about the wage gap. It’s not that my range of concerns isn’t far-reaching and wide. It’s not that I don’t care about racism, or poverty, or war, because these are all things I feel very strongly about. It’s not that I’m not keeping track of the news and not as if I don’t talk about it with friends and family, but why post about it here when there are plenty of other blogs which already do so and so much better than I possibly could?

What I mostly find myself concerned with writing about are the politics of gender and sex and sexuality. The concepts and constructs. Thus, even though I am not trans (not exactly cisgendered, either — genderqueer? maybe) I find myself talking about trans issues all the time, as an example, or reading up on intersex conditions, etc. I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly why this is. Why should I have such a profound interest in areas which have only very little to do with me?

I suppose it’s because I’m radical. Radical feminism is critical analysis, it’s seeing the whole picture, examining the entire framework, and finding the roots. Dismantling all the false assumptions on which the entire system thrives; because patterns of thought and behavior, especially those which are deeply embedded in the larger cultural psyche, are like weeds. Ideas are a living, growing, dynamic process. You can try to cut them down by hacking away at the growth, at the visible, conscious manifestations and their results and, in fact, this is necessary in order to allow a clear view of anything. However, until you take out the roots from which these ideas issue, the growth will always spring back, again and again. This is why feminist theory is just as important as feminist action and feminist organizing.

And all flawed systems, it seems, from sexism to racism to organized religion, any hierarchy you can imagine, depend on artificial constructions arising from the idea of duality. The construction of false dichotomies. The framework of diametrically opposed points, when, in fact, everything is a spectrum: male and female, masculine and feminine, good and evil, mental and physical, spiritual and material. It’s not that none of these things exist, it’s that they’re not a simple binary as so many people suppose.

So perhaps my pet causes aren’t always visible in the real world, not totally apparent to the untrained eye, perhaps too abstract and theoretical for everyone to readily grasp all the time — that doesn’t mean they’re not important. That doesn’t mean that they have nothing to do with me, or only a narrow application to certain small groups of people. Theoretical constructions affect everyone and have a huge impact on how we view the world. And so the basic assumptions which make a sexist social hierarchy possible to begin with — our current narrow concepts of sex and gender — need to be challenged. It’s only when these assumptions are dissected that the corrupt system issuing from them can be effectively dismantled.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Feminist Movement, Gender and Sex, Queer Issues, Sexuality, Theory.