Feminist Pride Day 2012

bunnehears:

This is the thing that makes me itch raw red holes in my skull. Is THIS what *f*eminism really and truly is???? REALLY??????

As it stands, this relentless drive to prove that feminism really and truly is inclusive—this is a movement of self-vindication. This is a movement to prove all the years of critique wrong. This is a movement TO ABSOLVE WHITE WOMEN OF THE TRUTH. 

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ENDING GENDERED VIOLENCE IN ALL IT’S FORMS. THIS IS NOT EVEN ABOUT FUCKING “GENDER EQUALITY.”

It is a movement to prove white women don’t have exclusive domain over feminism—and it is a movement LED BY WHITE WOMEN. (speaking generally here, I don’t know who the person is leading the “movement” in this article—thinking about the years and years of blog posts saying how important it is to call yourself a feminist and how “i’m not a feminist, but…” is the single most important problem facing feminism, etc).

that feminists spend SO FUCKING MUCH TIME on this—and then donate their money to good causes—instead of asking people who are on the brunt end of gender what is important to them and then working together to share resources/knowledge/skillz to *achieve what is important*—just proves the irrelevance of feminism in the lives of people who need a gender based movement. 

half the women in my life are on welfare, working multiple part time jobs, have sole custody of the kids based on absenteeism rather than denying custody to fathers—they want to know why men don’t have to pay child support (yeah, working under the table means you don’t have to pay), why they can’t ever find child care, why they’re treated like shit at the welfare office, why they have to take days off of work to be subjected to asshole treatment at the office—they have amazing gender based critiques of the way they are treated and their lives—

and *F*eminists want to be *sure*. Extra special 100% SURE—that the women in my life remember to call themselves feminists. be SURE of that. while you’re hustling some second hand cheap off brand fucking peanut butter at the local charity for dinner. that the feminists just gave all their donations to.

where’s that GIF of the chick eating lemons cuz she’s a bitter bitch??

(via bunnehears)

Ms Bunneh Ears is sooooo right…if feminists really cared about being relevant, they would focus on being relevant, on making FEMINISM accountable to women, rather than on marketing and in-group pride and appearing relevant, “showing” and “portrayals.”

(via quixotess)

Apologies for not replying to these comments earlier! We just saw them in the comments section of the Bitch Magazine site, where we posted this response:

Lena here from the Feminist Coming Out Day/Feminist Portrait Campaign. First of all, just want to say that I appreciate these comments being made available to us. I share a lot of the same opinions expressed by those in the comments above, though I think there are some misconceptions about who is organizing this project and what its goals are. First of all, my co-founder Abby is a full-time student and I am a writer. We’re both doing this on a volunteer basis and we are literally a two-person team so there are some limits to what we can do.

Oftentimes, mainstream feminism isn’t inclusive and “diversity” is just a tag line that people tack on without creating any substantive change. Part of the reason why we started this project is because we wanted to actually DO something to give ourselves and our fellow comrades an opportunity to discuss the ways that gender manifests itself in our lives. We wanted to create an accessible and democratic platform especially for those who aren’t typically heard: those who can’t work in feminist media or organizations, those who might not have the time or resources to organize, those who are considered “too young”, etc. And we count ourselves within these groups. No, this project does not mean that the lives of poor women are going to be radically different (and trust me, I know this firsthand as a first-generation American and a first-generation college attendee), but it’s our small contribution to the dialogue. It’s not meant to be representative of the entire feminist movement before us.

We do not work for feminist organizations, we do not have grant money, our participants are primarily students, and my co-founder is not even old enough to legally drink. We do have plenty of privilege, but whiteness is not one of them, and we don’t feel like we represent or are represented in the feminist “establishment”. We created the project because we felt frustrated that gender inequality is frequently only brought up in the context of issues affecting straight, white women. We know that feminism has historically excluded and even harmed marginalized people, but we’re not responsible for what other feminists have done in the past. What we want to do is to take that history, learn from it, and do something to remedy it. (And while I disagree with plenty of feminists who do things like deny people the right to “exist, self-identify, participate”, I find myself disagreeing with a lot of political liberals as well, and I’m still personally comfortable calling myself a feminist and a liberal.) We don’t expect everyone to adopt the feminist label, nor are we saying that labels ought to be priority #1. Ultimately, labels are secondary to the goal of ending oppression in all its forms.

We’re very much open to feedback and have encouraged people to email us with their concerns. For example, the original title of the event used “coming out” because of the involvement of the Harvard queer student group in its conception, but we decided, in response to concerns about queer appropriation, that we ought to change the name of the national campaign for next year. That change, however, wouldn’t have happened without open dialogue and the willingness of our critics to work with us in collaboration. We can be reached at feministcomingoutday@gmail.com (though we’re running behind on answering messages right now) and would be happy to address these and any other questions/concerns/etc.

One last thing: the last thing we are interested in doing is “absolv[ing] white women of the truth”. This isn’t supposed to cure feminism’s exclusion issues, and we expect and encourage allies to continue to critique and push and mold the movement into what we know it can be. But if you truly believe that feminism is broken and unsalvageable, then we also have no doubt that it’s possible to make change regardless of whether or not you adopt the label.

(via bigbadcolored-deactivated201104)

• Question: what is feminist coming out day? - Anonymous
• Answer:

  Feminist Coming Out Day happened on March 8th, but we’re extending the campaign throughout the month of March. We were founded by a group of Harvard University students who wanted to bring the Feminist Portrait Project to campuses throughout the country. (In charge of a feminist or social justice organization? Email feministcomingoutday@gmail.com to become a partner or set up an event.)

  Read more about our project on our About page, get our “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” shirt to support our non-profit partner Bitch Magazine, and find out all the ways you can get involved.

• Question: Are there going to be "This is what a feminist looks like" tshirts on sale at the event at Harvard Thursday night? That would be awesome! - Anonymous
• Answer:

  We can definitely make that happen at the “Activism and the Feminist Blogosphere” panel being hosted at Harvard. They’re cheaper* in person because we don’t have to pay shipping and handling, but if you’re not local to the Boston area, you can order a shirt for $20 online through IndieGoGo. Just make sure to read our sizing guide and email us with your size at feministcomingoutday@gmail.com.

  * $10 for Harvard students/$15 for non-students. The Harvard College Women’s Center is subsidizing part of the cost for discounted shirts.

• Question: how the hell was wellesley left out of this list??? - Anonymous
• Answer:

  Here’s the deal with our campus partners: there are a ton of feminists who have submitted to our project, but only some of them come from partner schools where a student organization has committed to promoting our campaign by soliciting “portraits” from their community. Many are also hosting on-campus events on March 8th and throughout Women’s History Month as part of the Feminist Portrait Project/Feminist Coming Out Day.

  Partnerships are a mutually beneficial endeavor. We want to create a more inclusive vision of contemporary feminism, but given that we’re a two-woman operation based largely in the East Coast (and one of us is a student who can’t travel often), it’s hard to organize at a local level on our own. Partnering with student activists allows us to get a larger and more geographically diverse number of participants involved. Students, on the other hand, do not always have the chance to reach national audiences, even if their efforts have a powerful impact on their local community. Planning a new event, particularly something as ambitious as a community portrait gallery, can also be a very daunting task. We help out by providing ready-made publicity materials, a tested game plan, and a website that allows them to showcase their hard work and maintain a record of their particular campus’ involvement (on local school pages). Some media outlets have also picked up on events that they might not have otherwise heard of, which is another great benefit of building a site with central listings.

  Though it’s easier to participate through an officially recognized club (an existing organizational structure, more funding options from your school, etc.), there’s no reason why a group of like-minded individuals couldn’t do it on their own. In the case of Wellesley, we simply didn’t have any contacts there ourselves, but we’ve noticed a stream of submissions coming from your students, so we just set up a community page. If you want to get a online or on-campus Feminist Portrait Project going for your school, just get in touch with us at feministcomingoutday@gmail.com. We’d be happy to talk!

  Keep the portraits rolling in! It’s great when these things happen organically :)

• Question: hello!
  I'm trying to add a photo to the Feminist Coming Out photo template, and so far am struggling!
  How do you do it please?! XD - salome-rising
• Answer:

  You can just copy and paste using an image editing program. But if you can’t figure it out, the Gangsta Feminists at Hobart and William Smith Colleges have been customizing our poster template for anyone who asks on Facebook.

the ch!cktionary: Lessons In Being An Ally

In the midst of all the excitement as March 8th draws closer, one of the things we want to acknowledge is the fact that Feminist Coming Out Day is not an event that everyone feels comfortable supporting, because of our use of the term “coming out”, which some view to be appropriative of queer experiences given its political and social connotations. The following entry comes from the blog of one of our co-organizers, Lena Chen. We welcome suggestions for a renaming of the project for 2012. Just email us at feministcomingoutday@gmail.com or submit your thoughts here.

In between stuffing envelopes and doing online publicity, one of the things I’ve been trying to address in regard to Feminist Coming Out Day are the claims of appropriation from the queer community. The following is a good summary of the concerns voiced so far and is written by melancolyscholar, whose post was reblogged on The Feminist Hub:

For some reason the use of the phrase “coming out” when speaking about feminism really bothers me.

I think it may be because in my own experience that being a feminist was met with far less resistance than being a lesbian.

I have lost friends after coming out as a lesbian. I have been told I’m going to hell, that one day I’ll find the right guy, that it is just a phase.

Being a feminist is different. Yes I have lost friends over feminist issues, but it is more often my choice because I don’t want to have friends who are douchebags.

In my experience it seems to me that if I meet someone who is anti-feminist, we can generally agree to disagree and no violence or abuse will come of that.

But every time I have ever had to come out (it’s not just a one time deal, it happens each time you meet a new person) I have more often than not feared for myself. It’s not just about losing friends there is violence that can happen.

I almost feel like that this day does a lot of erasing. It makes it seem like a feminist would never have had to come out in any way, shape, or form before (queer feminists are unicorns!) and it also seems to make light of the struggle that it takes for queer people to come out (if they choose to do so).

Just my opinion but maybe we need to rethink this day.

In retrospect, I should have recognized much earlier that people are not going to understand the “coming out” part of our event title to mean that queer students are involved in this project. More likely, they may assume that we are likening the queer coming out experience to the experience of recognizing gender inequity. That’s not what we’re trying to imply. As melancolyscholar explained above, there are far more hurdles to being public about one’s sexual orientation than there are to voicing support for feminism.

If the name of my project distracts from its goals and even hurts those it’s trying to represent, then I think we should listen to those concerns and work together to come up with a new name — one that continues to acknowledge the involvement of the queer students who helped start and sustain it, and one that also doesn’t offend those who aren’t familiar with the event’s origins. (If you have any ideas, please email us at feministcomingoutday@gmail.com.)

One of The Feminist Hub’s readers read post by melancolyscholar and responded with the following:

I don’t think we need to overanalyze the use of “coming out” in Feminist Coming Out Day. It is natural, and okay, to give it some thoughts and considerations but I think the idea behind the coming out day counts more than the actual use of words. I can see how it might be annoying, or even a little bit hurtful, to some people but it’s hard to always please everyone. I think that calling it a Feminist Coming Out Day is just another way to draw more attention and focus to feminism, to have a special day where you can show your friends/family/university/whatever that you are indeed a feminist and proud of it. Maybe they could have used a different word, but I think the purpose behind the day means more and is more important than the words themselves.

Which, in my opinion, completely misses the point and suggests that the writer is coming from a place of privilege. That’s not to say that the writer is a bad, inconsiderate person, but rather that their opinion reflects the default position of mainstream feminism, which has done a poor job of listening to critiques from marginalized groups. As I’ve written before on this blog, “Feminism, like many progressive social movements (LGBT rights included), is not always concerned with the issues affecting poor women, women of color, disabled women, queer women, the list goes on … even progressive movements value some people more than others. It means that those with the luxury of time and the luxury of capital can set the agenda that women like my mother don’t even have time to read.”

Feminism, like any movement, is not infallible. It’s run and led by human beings, who are flawed and have biases, who are influenced by personal interests, who sometimes can’t see past their own identities and their own privilege. I try to be very cognizant of my privilege, and I’m still not always aware of it. Sometimes, I don’t notice it until other people point it out. And because I have no interest in perpetuating the silencing and erasure that I’ve witnessed in feminism, I’d rather admit to my screw-ups than pretend I’m above them, because I think that type of honesty is going to lead to far more progress and hopefully get others to consider their privilege as well. It’s important to show people that none of us are perfect allies, because if we’re too proud to say that, then we’re not being very good allies at all.

• Question: I was wondering if I could make a " This is what a feminist looks like " t -shirt out of a regular t-shirt from a craft store and foam paint, with the link to the website written under it. I'm worried I won't be able to donate the money before the t-shirt is sold out and I'm worried it won't come in my size ( xl-xxl). My intention isn't to sell or steal the idea, I just want to represent my femmes in any way I can that is convenient for me and my broke femme ass. - Anonymous
• Answer:

  Absolutely! We don’t expect everyone to be able to buy our t-shirt, which is why we created an online campaign that would allow a lot of folks to participate even if they don’t have a ton of money and aren’t attending school. You can represent feminism with or without merchandise that says “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” and the strongest, most inspiring advocates for gender equality that we know of do precisely that each and every single day.

  When you do finish making your t-shirt, we’d love to see a photo of you wearing it! And for anyone else who wants to get creative, send in pictures of your do-it-yourself feminist gear to our Feminist Portrait Project :)

• Question: how do you reserve your size? i contributed 2 weeks ago but never got the option to select a size.. - hermione-the-feminist
• Answer:

  Here are the easy steps to scoring your “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt:

  1. Read the FAQs on our IndieGoGo donation page for information on sizing and fit.
  2. Make a minimum contribution of $20 (if you are shipping within U.S.) or $30 (if you are shipping abroad).
  3. Each order comes with a “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” button and a sticker. To receive an extra button or sticker, add $1 to your contribution.
  4. Email feministcomingoutday@gmail.com with your requested size and extra merchandise requests (indicate if you would prefer buttons or stickers).
  5. Snap a photo of yourself in your gear and submit it to our Feminist Portrait Project :)