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When I discovered feminism my whole view of the world and my place within it became disorientated. The Beauty Myth by Niaomi Wolf (1990) and Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given (2020) were my new ways, like many other women, of understanding myself and the systems I had grown up with. Shaving and wearing makeup were linked to capitalist exploitation, dieting was the enemy and skincare a scam. I was angry, like many others, at the fact that the MeToo movement had to exist, that women were paid less and barely represented within and by our governments.
Whilst all of the above remains valid, something was missing, someone was missing. Why was mainstream feminism only ever focussed on the lives of wealthy western women who could afford the skincare they were so enraged by? Why were the feminists we all looked up to doing paid promotions for large and problematic companies on social media? Where were the women from the global south and what did they think of our feminism?
These questions led me to texts such as Decolonial Feminism by Françoise Vergès (2021), The Hidden Face of Eve by Nawal El Sadaawi (1980), Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (2022) amongst countless others. Women all over the world have long been engaged in deeply complex fights for freedom that put western feminism to shame. From the Kurdish women who began the Jin Jiyan Azadi, (Women Life Freedom) movement across Kurdistan and Iran following the murder of a Kurdish woman by the morality police, to the Palestinian women who went on hunger strike to demand the release of a murdered Palestinian activist’s body. Why had I not heard of them? Why had I actively had to seek them out? Why had Florence Given, amongst countless others, remained deafeningly silent on the complexity of feminism all over the globe?
When the focus of mainstream feminism is solely the lives of Western women, the success of the Barbie movie or how much money women are earning in sports, we have to start questioning the movement as a whole. Feminism has become inherently linked to capitalism and thus neatly fits into the systems of violence and oppression in place, and how can something so monetised change the world? Women in the west are neatly becoming a part of the already functioning patriarchal system in which the Gaza and Sudan genocides are taking place with Western backing and silence.
None of this is productive or reflective of what feminism should be.
As long as popular feminist figures, journalists and academics remain silent about women all over the globe, in particular those in Palestine and Sudan, I am forced to accept that feminism has become a practice of self-help and white hegemony, and this is not the revolutionary movement it should be. This is potentially why women in the Middle East feel uncomfortable with the term “feminism” as a whole, preferring to use “women’s activism” instead. Feminism doesn’t represent them or their lives but actively partakes in their suppression. Is it really a success that more women are part of the British army? Is it really a success that more women are part of the deeply flawed western governments? Is it really a success that feminism is monetised and mainstreamed, diluted of all meaning?
It is thus vital that we begin to rethink feminism as a whole, looking towards the revolutionary women from the Middle East and beyond who sacrifice their lives to fight against the systems of oppression women in the west have put in place.
Edited by Phineas Horan
Image: A Protester Holding a Placard, Oct 1, 2022, Free to use.
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