Question 2: Did/does feminism help to frame your politics? Or does/did your politics frame your engagement with feminism/feminists?
Delia: Although it may seem circuitous, I think that I can best answer this question by continuing my narrative. In the late 80s, 1987 to be exact, we (Karin’s father, brother, and myself) spent the year in the Philippines. That was a very, very stimulating period. Politics was in the air, and the atmosphere was, quite simply, electric. The women’s movement, a feminist one now, was the most alive and visible among the progressive associations. I set up a small study group of women who met weekly to read and study feminism. It was very different from any group I had participated in in the United States. For one thing, these women had a wealth of experience in revolutionary activity, and so every little paragraph that we read (representing theory) was incessantly interrupted by a discussion of multiple examples of lived realities (representing practice). For another, many of our weekly meetings had to be shelved because there were urgent actions constantly taking place, some of them on behalf of a person or persons arrested or tortured, while others entailed joining massive demonstrations. But now that the democratic space allowed travel and an easy flow of ideas from the West, I perceived an understanding of race and racism to be an important subject for us Filipino feminists to grapple with. That was not a topic that was readily grasped in our study group. But it bothered me no end that US feminists would come and lecture to Filipino women about how, for example, we should “not keep blaming colonialism for [our] problems as women.†The message: move on, already; you just don’t know it, but it’s your men who are the problem. It also bothered me that Filipino feminists could mindlessly quote something that, say, Betty Friedan wrote and apply that directly to our situation as Filipino women. As a result, I found myself waging a wholly new educational struggle. I began reading feminist theory in a different way–and now feminist presses and feminist theory-making in the US were burgeoning–and I started thinking and writing about how feminist theoretical production in the industrial West could adversely affect Third World women’s movements.
When we returned to the United States, the growing dominance of the “cultural turn†was becoming evident in the academy. Having just arrived from the Philippines where, despite a lively women’s organization, the progressive movement as a whole had retained its economist character, I welcomed this trend as an antidote. Postmodernism seemed to give room for conversations around race and gender in addition to class in its insistence on recognizing “difference.†I initially experienced this trend as freeing, both from the restrictions of a rigid class-bound perspective embraced by national liberation, and from the racism and narrowness of middle-class, white feminism. By this time, too, the neoconservatism inaugurated by the Reagan/Bush administration had taken hold and progressive organizations in the US had all but disappeared. What was left of organizing became local and specific, having lost any overarching or unifying frame. In fact, thinking back, I realize that it was as early as 1982 that feminists in the US started asking one another, where’s the women’s movement? Connected as I was to the struggle in the Philippines, I wasn’t troubled by this, knowing fully well that it was very much alive in the Philippines and in other Third World countries.
Today feminism is confined to the academy in the United States. There has not been a women’s movement to speak of for sometime, although its absence is something feminists themselves seem fearful of examining seriously. Progressive politics in the academy has been enacted mainly in the discursive, cultural terrain, with a profound disconnect from the real world, even when it employs “left†rhetoric. Its language is elitist, its jargon incomprehensible except to initiates, and its progressive claim highly questionable. To be expected of a Third World neocolonial formation, the academy in the Philippines has not been free of this influence. But as always, rapid changes in the global political economy—more specifically, the devastation and immiseration that neoliberalism has brought about—have spawned a worldwide anti-globalization movement that is now difficult to ignore. The “Battle of Seattle†of 1999 and the numerous international gatherings in its wake signal a new, altogether different type of movement. In contrast to academics, feminists included, whose unspoken mantra has been Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative), anti-globalization activists speak of a new world that is possible. Perhaps some among them imagine a “new world†in which capitalism might be humanized, but one hopes that others will come to envision a totally different society. This has to happen, because following the terror of 9/11, the Bush administration’s “war on terror,†and the invasion of Iraq, it is an understatement to assert that we live in perilous times.
Of course, I continue my interest in Filipino women and in political struggle. The unprecedented diaspora of Filipino migrant workers is currently a topic that is being researched by feminists in the United States. This is all very good, but only if these studies do not fail to critique the predations of globalized capitalism. Unfortunately, so far little is happening along these lines. For this reason, feminist politics as it exists right now is hardly relevant to me. You might say that my tenure as a “feminist†has been very short lived.
Karin: I think for me, because of when and how I grew up, feminism and politics were all the same thing. I mean that “feminism†was one small, mostly unspoken part of what I understood as “politics.†It was all just woven together into one cloth: the idea that girls/women are human, and the idea that all humans deserve to live in a just and fair society. As I remember my childhood, feminism hardly ever needed to be spoken out loud. I was the oldest child, and I do not remember being treated differently from my younger brother. I saw my mother as her own person, not a shadow of my father as was the case for some of my friends’ parents. Politics writ large shaped my memories of school, and growing up as a political person included discussions with my parents, homework assignments, and arguments with my teachers about the evils of capitalism, colonialism, and U.S. imperialism.
From the kitchen table, I could see a poster my parents had taped to the dark wood paneling. It was a black mask on an orange background that read: “Kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa?†(If not now, then when?) I always interpreted that to mean that one day there would be a people’s revolution and on that day, the people would be free. It was a hopeful message, but also a call to action and political consciousness—a warning about the dangers that would come if one did not act or become aware.
From when I was in fifth grade in 1972 until 1984 when I graduated from college, the main issue—really the defining issue—that shaped my political life was the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. This was the issue that shaped my parents’ vexed relationship to their homeland, and so therefore it also shaped my sense of connection to a place and a history beyond my parents. Looking back I know this is so because at my 10th high school reunion in 1990, a white American woman whom I liked but barely knew greeted me with a fist in the air. “Makibaka!†she shouted, flashing me a big grin. She was referring, of course, to the revolutionary slogan of the anti-imperialist movement that I taught all my classmates (and everyone in the entire school, evidently) and also wore plastered in orange letters on my favorite brown sweatshirt for our class picture that year. I stood in the middle of the front row, so the slogan is plainly visible to this day to anyone who still has the picture!
I don’t think I ever thought of myself as anything other than “Filipino†until after college in the mid- to late 1980s. Feminism was an assumed category; it could be so for me because my parents did not place any obvious expectations upon me to fulfill my “womanly†role as someone else’s wife, and I was never instructed to marry a doctor, lawyer, or some such professional man. Instead, I was very clearly expected to become that person myself. In addition, I also received the message that my professional independence should be the highest—maybe only goal—above and beyond any kind of personal or family relationship. I wonder if other women of my generation got a similarly strong message from their 70s activist parents.
And the role models I had for being a politically engaged Filipino person were not only, maybe hardly ever, men. For example, I remember Sister Caridad and Father Gigi, crazy-acting radical clergy who gave themselves wholeheartedly to fighting martial law in the Philippines. I remember my parents’ friends who were hippie artists or writers or students or teachers. I remember that hardly anyone my parents knew and liked got married in a traditional ceremony, and certainly none of the women went so far as to change their last names. In contrast to these activist friends, “regular†(white, mainstream, heterosexual) people in town such as the town doctor and dentist had “all-American†families with wives who didn’t even have their own first names and children who were allowed to go out on dates and drive the family car.
Feminism became an identifiable political agenda unto itself for me in college. Having professional, academic parents boosted me into an elite world in which I was able to find myself and define myself in personal, social, and political terms. As it turns out, many of my women peers were raised in horribly patriarchal families where ancestral lineage mattered because generations of accumulated wealth was passed down through men. Many of my smartest women friends were never expected to do much more than graduate with a shiny degree from our fancy college, only to find a man of the same, or better, social status. They were rebelling against the weight of all of that, something I didn’t know anything about. My best friend in college came from a similar background as me, with a powerful, highly educated mother and clearly articulated expectation that she be her own person. We got along because of an assumed belief in our own capabilities as human—which, since we are women, could be called “feminism.â€
Today I would say that feminism gives me political voice. I mean that without feminism as an agenda that demands attention for marginalized groups, my views and my ideas would never be included in any political forum. But at the same time, feminism does not necessarily guide me in determining the terms of my political engagement. Now as a person with job stability in academia, I look for ways to build and support movements for social justice. I am less interested in feminism as a theory—say, coming out of women’s studies—than I am in feminism as form of engagement among theorists and practitioners of social change. I was never very attracted to Women’s Studies, or to the professionalization of feminism in academia. At the same time, as a person now seeking tenure at a liberal arts college, I am very grateful to the feminists in academia who included me in their circles even before I had earned the “proper†credentials because they recognized my writings and organizing work as contributions to their field.
While feminism and feminists have helped me to find myself, I think I would have to say that as a political agenda for broad-based structural change, feminism has never appealed to me. And, as feminists have moved into academia and turned common-sense ideas about women and gender oppression into high theory, I have been even less compelled to keep up with what is going on there. Similarly, I have not followed developments in lgbtq studies, or queer studies, because I have not found them interesting, or engaged, with the realities that I understand deeply and care about. In some ways, that has been my loss, as I have been unable to participate in sophisticated ways in conversations happening across academia. Recently, a queer Latino scholar visited our campus and I was invited to join an informal conversation with him over dinner. Considered a “rising star†in his field, this person is immersed in academic culture, its norms and its values are embedded in his every gesture, and yet he is also committed to theorizing for social change. I admired his dedication to his work; I even got excited about some of the ideas he proposed about “queer†as a stance of political rebellion, for instance. But I do admit that the job of high theorizing does not appeal to me much—which is what most of the feminists and queers around me are doing these days, when they are not going shopping.
So if feminism does not shape my politics, what does? I think I have created my own framework for social justice out of an eclectic, and perhaps somewhat strange, collection of life and work experiences. In this, of course, I demonstrate my many privileges: my view of what is wrong in the world—and how it should be changed—is not based in a position of stark oppression or economic subordination, and I do not keep an organic connection to a neighborhood or a social group or a political party or a nation. In this, I suppose I am very “American,†very individualist, middle-class, and just plain petit-bourgeois. This is my background, and I don’t think I can or need to do anything to change it. On the other hand, one of the points of these essays is to suggest that our views about feminism have been shaped by the particular contexts in which we developed into politically conscious adults. I have been exposed throughout my life to a variety of people and struggles from which I have learned that human suffering is not natural or inevitable, and that many changes are both possible and necessary.
Now as a person who is paid to teach and write about that world—even though I am deeply ambivalent about being ensconced in an ivory tower and being stranded, as I often tell people, in the Great White North—I would say that you cannot claim to “know†anything if you do not understand who you are and where you came from. That may not be a question of feminism, but it is definitely a question of community.
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