A question of labels
Denise Hammond examines what’s at risk for feminism
It has been fifteen years since the Montréal Massacre at École Polytechnique. For many, the social and political context for remembering the murder of fourteen women – women who were snarlingly demonified as “feminists” – has been replaced by sentimental gestures and symbolic rituals: buy a button, wear a ribbon, attend a vigil. Throughout Canada, many of the vigils and markers on university and college campuses seem to allow an annual atonement that excuses people from their responsibility to challenge women’s oppression in a concerted way, every day.
I was fortunate to attend a memorial dinner at Ryerson University that featured a lecture by Dr. Sharon Rosenburg from the University of Alberta on the social role of memorials. Her presentation was a reflection on how the significance of tragic events like the Dec 6, 1989 Massacre can be diminished and replaced by static memorial objects and sculptures that obscure both the identities of the individual victims and the important underlying socio-economic issues that led to the tragedy.
Rosenburg did not claim that all memorials are inherently depoliticising. Rather, she suggested that once a monument has been created, it becomes the context for future remembrances of the events it serves to memorialize. Though this allows the community to move on, over time these signifiers (be they park benches in Montreal or geographical markers in Victoria) can eventually lose their connection to the original issues that gave occasion for their creation.
This process makes possible the collective amnesia that would allow the murder of 14 women, and the impact this had on women and men across the country, to be erased for future generations. Reflecting on Rosenburg’s presentation and the lack of knowledge many young women have about the events of Dec 6th, 1989, I was drawn to conclude that not only were Rosenburg’s thoughts insightful, but her talk provided an important occasion to reflect upon the importance that preserving a contextual analysis of our history has for raising political consciousness.
In addition to presenting on the socio-cultural phenomenon of memory and memorabilia, Rosenburg challenged the audience to see the Dec 6 massacre as an inherently anti-feminist attack. Many, at first, were bewildered by this interpretation and this hesitancy is not without justification. After all, feminists from that time will remember how difficult it was to fight to have the murders classified in the media and by the public and authorities as an act of “violence against women.” A number of campus and mainstream newspapers of the day labelled the shootings as an attack on “engineering students” or just simply “students.” Missing from this portrayal however is the cold reality that, judging from how he waved his gun through the corridors of the Polytechnique and what he wrote in his suicide note, Lapin did not merely set out to dispatch women; he very clearly and passionately sought to kill “feminists”.
Lapin certainly didn’t take the time to investigate the personal politics of the 14 women he shot and killed. However, despite this, Lapin’s choice of words was not accidental and it tells us something important about the social significance of the label “feminist.” For men like Lapin, and all those men and women who resisted efforts to define his actions as “violence against women”, the word “feminist” conjures negative, derogatory and anti-male sentiments and thereby contributes to the development of a culture of distrust towards those advocating for women’s rights.
But who is responsible for erasing the specifically anti-feminist character of Lapin’s murderous actions? Did the feminist movements of the day fail to deliver a strong enough message? How was their message quietly co-opted in a way that better allowed the community to grieve rather than to acknowledge the complex issues that Lapine’s actions underscored?
If we are to move forward and inspire youth activists today to join and continue the feminist struggles, it is important to understand why there wasn’t – and still isn’t – a national dialogue about how Lapin’s actions bolstered a broader social vilification of women’s empowerment, equality, and participation in the various feminist movements. Lapin’s characterization of women who assume traditionally male roles as “feminists” is an example of the misperception that women belong to distinct and mysteriously homogenous class. Each bullet is a testament to his view of women as “other”, sub-human and threatening. By defining Lapin’s violence as simply an attack on women and not as a distinctly anti-feminist act, the women’s movement lost an important opportunity to fight the feminist backlash – a backlash that is still prevalent today as much in the streets as in the chilly classrooms of colleges and universities.
Campuses today, however, present an irony of sorts: while fewer women self-identify as feminists, there appears to be a concurrent rise in women’s political involvement both in students’ unions and coalition groups that partake in forms of direct action. But with a glaring absence of feminist self-labelling, it is no surprise that young campus feminists find themselves confused not just by the label and language of feminism, but by the theory and practice that sees issues of gender or sex as intersecting with race, class, sexual orientation and ability.
To explore a snapshot of where campus feminist movements are at today, I interviewed several women activists on three questions: What is feminism to you? What role does it have in your political activities on/off campus? And how do you view the feminist movement in the context of today’s political struggles?
What’s feminism?
Feminism is a word that has many interpretations and meanings, but its connection to the experiences of activism that many younger women have is ambiguous. There was an inconsistency between how the activists I interviewed theorized feminism and how they practised it in their activism. The women I interviewed had divergent notions of feminism and they recognised that there are different tendencies and approaches to it. However, each of them held the view that feminism was ultimately rooted in an idea of equality between genders and sexes that is based, at least in part, on some idea of “parity”. All too often, I was told that feminism is only about equality: equality with men in the workplace, equality in the home and equal access to capital. This common understanding – that of liberal feminism – accommodates capitalist relations and displaces a much more complex understanding of feminism: one that sees issues of sex and gender intersecting with those of power and privilege in relation to race, class, sexual orientation and ability. This second, more complex understanding of feminism is socialist feminism.
Thus, the interviews I conducted followed an interesting political trajectory. Though many of the women spoke eloquently about power dynamics and class or race relations, when it came time to talking about women’s emancipation from oppression, the answers diminished in complexity and frequently fell back to the classical liberal position – achieving equality. The prevalence of liberal feminist understandings is not that surprising given that modern Western capitalism has had so much time to adapt to the challenges posed by feminism that its dominant ideology has successfully absorbed and nullified the more complex and critical notions of socialist feminism.
Rather than pointing our fingers at these activists to accuse them of having a limited understanding of feminism, we should use these observations to reflect on how capitalist social relations normalise feminism and reduce it to its least challenging incarnations. A deeper concept of feminism should be based on a critical analysis of capital, economic exploitation, and Western “democracy”, and would provide women with an emancipatory framework for the fight for equity.
As the government and the marketplace have been given license to move higher education away from the ancient tenets of a liberal education – which included philosophy and critical thinking – and towards credentialism, commercialization, marketability and employability, there has been a corresponding shift in the analysis embedded in the curriculum. As a result, new generations of graduates are being shuffled through the education factory with limited intellectual engagement and only rare excursions below surface-level understandings of critical theory and consciousness. Furthermore, outside of the classroom there has been a significant and visible decline in public, radical, revolutionary women’s movements. This is compounded by the general decline in cohesive coalition politics within activist communities of a post-Trade Summit era, where movement politics are experiencing a general decline of mobilizations (both in size and frequency).
Weakened Process
Taken together, these trends have a strong impact on the relationship young women have to themselves and on how they understand feminism. In particular, they have led to a general disappearance of feminist mentorship and labelling and thus have weakened the process through which critical feminist theory and practice grows over time. The result is that there are fewer spaces for women to develop and hone their political consciousness as feminist. This is a real loss, because feminists, like other activists, are not born, they are formed and they develop through ongoing critical education and politicizing life experiences.
Reflecting back on the Montreal Massacre, we can see the obvious tension between labels and the realities they represent. For Lapin, the term “feminist” stood for strong women who were to blame for social and personal ills and who should pay for this crime with their lives. The dark irony to Lapin’s actions is that they served to underscore, perhaps more vividly than anything else, the need for all women to identify with feminism and take action for change. However, for the young activists I interviewed, developing an understanding of the different theoretical approaches to feminism is one thing, but accepting feminism as a personal label or means of self-identification is another.
Indeed, although most of the women I interviewed recognized the importance of having a feminist perspective, very rarely did they seem to identify openly as feminist in the same way and with the same confidence as they did with other perspectives, such as socialism or Marxism. For some active women, working within a particular framework does not necessarily translate into personal ownership over a feminist identity. The result of this is that other young women have fewer role models and the number and influence of feminist role models for other young women on campuses diminishes. As a further illustration, two of eight individuals I spoke to indicated that in a women’s studies class where the size ranged from 50 to 100 people, when the professor asked who identified as a feminist only two members in the class raised their hand.
Most interviewees noted that while many coalitions and political groups claim to have a feminist perspective, their activism is informed almost exclusively by a class-based analysis. One activist described this phenomenon as the melting pot effect, where activists appear to have both dominant and subordinate perspectives/identities. For example, activists may identify as anti-racist, feminist, socialist, anti-authoritarian, etc., but these perspectives/identities are almost universally subordinate to a strictly political-economic analysis. The result is that explicitly feminist work is consistently diluted within broader political agendas.
Women’s Centres
Many women I interviewed spoke of how campus feminist work was done in women’s centres. However, because many urban campus women’s centres have risen to take action on the rights and recognition of transgender peoples, the political work of explicitly promoting women’s rights and inclusion sometimes fall to the wayside. While challenging transphobia is a necessary part of challenging the social, political and cultural oppressions at the root of sexism, there still remains much work to be done to further the project of women’s liberation.
In the same way that much of the original understanding of Dec 6 has been replaced with a faded Polaroid counterfeit, so too has much of the history of feminist struggle for basic rights – a struggle whose goals have not yet been fully realised – been co-opted and revised so as to lull the current generation into complacency. Much has been gained by years of feminist radicals campaigning, as feminists, for progressive change: abortion rights have been won and largely defended, sex and gender roles have been bent and expanded and, in many respects, the largest hurtles to “equality” (access to many services and occupations) have been surpassed. However, equity – in the strong sense of the term, where it refers to a goal that cannot be achieved without a radical transformation of society on new values that embrace all people and distribute power between and among them – remains a distant point on a fading horizon. By not publicly and proudly carrying the feminist tradition and label forward, I wonder whether younger women are allowing the term ‘feminism’ to be co-opted and used as a political instrument to maintain and reinforce women’s oppression.
More Than Labels
The complex state of the women’s feminist movement (if such a movement exists) can’t however be reduced to a just a question of labels. There are many reasons why young activists don’t identify with feminism, for some those reasons stem from the ongoing failure of women’s movements to intersect with issues of race, class and sexual orientation. But, to ensure that the political cause first picked up by our mothers and grandmothers isn’t dropped, we need to develop a feminist vision that is inclusive and relevant.
The women’s movement must be a place where multiple intersecting oppressions are challenged. It must be a political project as well as a method of organising. The disconnection between our struggles and the values of our younger sisters must be bridged and the perception that feminist movements are no longer relevant because “equality has been gained” must be challenged and replaced with the idea that for true social transformation to be achieved, informed collective action is required.
All this cannot happen without young women of today and tomorrow standing up and declaring: “I am a feminist”. The task for the rest of us is to rise to their challenge and push forward a movement that not only lists feminism as one of its solidarity labels, but rather works from feminism as a framework for every action.
Denise Hammond is a self-identified feminist and a member of the Toronto NSG. Special thanks to all the activists that participated in interviews, much respect for your work and commitment to bring the struggles forward.