eally it's a list of questions more than anything else but as it's 4am my time, you can see that these things are currently interfering with my sleep patterns.
1) How did we end up with "feminism" as the default for talking about social justice?
Other oppressions/privileged groups that we want to talk about get defined negatively ("racism" "homophobia" "ableism" "cis-sexism" "heteronormativity" to name a few). We don't have words common to most media vernacular to talk about the beliefs, practices and procedures for combating them ("critical theory" and "critical race studies" come to mind but I haven't seen them used outside of academia really).
With, what I hope, is an actual turn towards intersectionality, why is social justice action still focused (at least linguistically) on gender with the phrase becoming "intersectional feminism" or variants thereof? Along with that, why is "patriarchy" so prevalent while "kyriarchy" is not and I'm not aware of single-word terms that focus foremost on race or class.
In terms of what my limited knowledge of history regarding struggles of oppressed people (both in terms of massive systemic oppression and revolutions for rights) suggests, it's not that gender came first. How did we end up gender-centric and should we try to change our language way beyond adding "intersectional" in front of "feminism"?
2) Why are we acting like facts matter again? What can we do otherwise?
I spent admittedly too long reading comments on snopes articles and media posts about the turnout for Trump's inauguration and the press conference held today. If there's one thing we should have learned from the bold faced lying from Trump and his campaign and subsequent voting for Trump it's that arguing facts don't matter when trying to convince someone who is diametrically opposed or even slightly beyond on the fence (arguably there is a whole world of social psych that also could have told you this before then). So, how do we actually deal with a world where facts don't matter to POTUS and to his supporters? I mean, initially including facts is helpful for fence sitters and people who already have anti-Trump beliefs but they don't actually work in terms of convincing others (nor educating perhaps?). So, how do we interact politically with people we disagree with when realizing that facts and rationality aren't on the table (none of us are perfectly rational)? How must politics (and economics and traffic laws and a lot of other things) change when we stop with the idealization that humans are rational actors in this world?
3) How do you convince people that rights are rights?
There was an article by Slate that looked at what Trump supporters thought of the Women's March and one of the quotes is from Tate, from Georgia: “I just don’t understand why they are marching. I don’t know what rights they are losing or what’s being threatened.”
And that one in particular I found interesting because I think it in a simple way gets at a common divide. It doesn't have to be that Tate doesn't know that the ACA is being gutted, Trump is emboldening police forces across the country that already are doing massive amounts of violence to persons of colour and queer folk are fearing for their marriages and their ability to just go pee in public without confrontation. It can honestly be read as Tate doesn't think those things are related to people's rights.
So how do you convince people that health care or the ability to get married or live not in constant fear of the police are in fact rights that everyone should have (and perhaps the right to own a gun shouldn't be or at least shouldn't be quite so unlimited)? I've studied theories of rights and what various scholars say is a right and what isn't a right and how to determine them but it doesn't actually answer the question of how to convince people and looking at the question above, how do you do it without relying on people believing rational arguments and without relying on facts? Convincing people matters as long as we live in democracies where others do get to vote on the folks who decide whether I have a right or not (or appoint people to a court that decides or myriad other ways things come back to the electorate). Even if Tate understands some amount of the privilege they possess, if that doesn't tie back into rights in some way, does that matter?
4) This one is a bit different from the rest but I've spent awhile trying to find an article I read from the Feminist Blog-O-Sphere some time since 2010 about how women (according to the author all women but I'd say it more so applies to white women) are allowed and encourage a little bit of masculinity. The examples I remember included barbequing and Jodi Picoult and the phrase, I think, was something food related "a snack of masculinitiy" "a bite of..." etc. How do I find this article again?
Part of me wonders if the marches and protests fall into this idea. It's totally fine for (white) women to have a moment of being loud and saying "no, this isn't okay" as long as nothing gets damaged and then they fall back into complacency (and of course support cis-sexist understandings of womanhood in their protesting). I'd really like to re-read the article but I cannot find it and have no clue when it was published (most likely 2010 or 2011 but not definitely) nor where it was published (I was reading around 80 plus sites daily then so looking in bookmarks and favorites doesn't help either).
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